Are Religious Values a Sham?

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While out walking I sometimes listen to a program on National Public Radio called Hidden Brain. Its usual fare are the psychological quirks and oddities of human beings.

A recent broadcast was about the famous 1960s experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram in which Milgram professed to show that most people will do what an authority figure tells them to do, regardless whether it’s right or wrong.

The experiments, which I believe to be problematic for at least a couple of reasons, touch on the nature of human beings, their intrinsic goodness or evil, their ability to make ethical decisions and their freedom, all of which, I believe, are crucial questions for people searching for God.

Acquiescence

Milgram came by his interest in the subject honestly. According to the program, he was influenced by the Holocaust and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was hanged by the Israelis in 1962. His question, still unanswered, was, “How could the majority of German citizens acquiesce in the mass killing of millions of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ before and during the Second World War?”

To answer this question, Milgram, a Harvard University professor, designed a series of experiments, described this way by Wikipedia.

Subjects, usually college students, come to a laboratory “believing that they are about to take part in a study of memory and learning. After being assigned the role of teacher, (they are) asked to teach word associations to a fellow subject (who in reality is a collaborator of the experimenter).

The teaching method, however, consists in administering increasingly higher electric shocks to the “learner” for incorrect answers, presenting "the teacher" with an ethical conflict.

Stanley Milgram

As the pain increases, the strapped “learner” demands to be set free and his suffering appears to pose a risk to his health. If “the teacher” asks the experimenter to set the “learner” free, the experimenter insists the situation is not as unhealthy as it appears, and that the teacher must continue as agreed. Contradicting expectations, “some 65 percent of all subjects continue to administer shocks up to the very highest levels.”

Milgram, the Wikipedia article says, believed "the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow."

My two principal objections to the experiments is that the designers must lie to the participants about the true nature of the experiments. That, it seems to me, is a serious ethical flaw. And secondly, the experiments are carried out among college students, which, in my view, are not representative of the general population.

But here’s a related question to Milgram’s questions about the German people’s apparent acquiescence to the Holocaust: How could the German people, the majority of whom were Christian, do so? Does it mean that Christian moral teaching is fallacious and useless?

Guidance Wrong?

I remember reading that a majority of doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands frequently or thoroughly when treating patients. Does that mean that the guidance on frequent and thorough hand-washing is wrong? Of course not. It simply means that health-care workers often fail to take their own advice because they’re not paying attention, doubt the efficacy of the guidance or are indifferent about the outcome.

Many people simply ignore “Christian values” or profess them when in fact they reflect an exaggerated sense of patriotism, nationalism, their cultural tradition or other ideologies that conflict with the values that Christ taught. If you want to know what constitutes religious values read the Beatitudes and St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13. 

Among other things, you’ll see that Christianity - as well as Judaism and many other major religions I know about - teach respect for life. The fact that many adherents to these faiths fail to follow this teaching, or fail to see its application to real life, has no bearing on the teaching’s value.