Goodness Not From God

“The greatest tragedy
in mankind’s entire history
may be the hijacking
of morality by religion.”

--Arthur C. Clarke


By Diane Petryk-Bloom

Religion makes us good, kind, and morally pure.
Without religion, society would become chaotic and depraved.

Children being properly raised go to church.

This is what you “know” about God that is wrong.

Hard evidence shows that the more godless a society, the more healthy it is by all sociological measures. (We’ll get to the specifics.)

Yet to believe the contrary is as universal as American opinions come.

Even those who doubt the existence of a supernatural being, think we ought to hang on to the idea of a potentially punishing god -- just to keep us all in line.

To be openly atheist is socially – sometimes even physically -- risky. Your neighbors might prefer to live next to a born-again sex-offender. (cartoon) You have better chance being elected to public office openly gay than openly skeptical. You cannot be a pariah faster in this age of diversity, than to blurt out, “I’m an atheist.”

“But you look so nice,” they tell Florida humanist Jennifer Hancock when she reveals her godless state.

“Then you must smoke,” a teacher responds to the high school student who confides she has no religious belief.

“Ask Sally out, you’ll get lucky. She doesn’t believe in God…”
The social worker deciding on a recommendation in a child custody suit gives more points to the parent who attends church regularly.

That an atheist would automatically not be “nice” or automatically break school rules or be more likely to be promiscuous or a bad parent, is the prevailing American view.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported in early 2006 that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups when asked to share their vision of American society.

The atheists were not selected for rejection by any small margin of the 2,000 households responding, said one of the researchers, Assistant Professor Joseph Gerteis, and when it came to the possibility of their children marrying into a minority group, respondents wanted them to steer clear of atheists above all.

The study’s lead researcher, Associate Sociology Professor Penny Edgell, said she believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings.

Ten years earlier, in The Last Taboo, Radcliff’s Wendy Kaminer had already observed that intolerance of atheism surpassed that of homosexuality and wrote: “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.”

“Who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today?” wrote New York Times science writer Natalie Angier in 2001, “a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining “what Jesus would do” and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional “freedom of religion” means ‘freedom from religion,’ or ‘indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

We might add, where this country’s top law enforcement officer can say: “Civilized individuals,” which he limits to Christians, Jews and Muslims, “all understand the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” That was then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002.

The sense that someone who does not actively believe in God is a morally unreliable or untrustworthy is pervasive in America, confirms James Turner, professor of history and the philosophy of science at Notre Dame University.

To be fair, George W. Bush did say atheists could be as patriotic as religious folks, but he might have been advised to say so against his own personal view after some objection was raised to his father’s 1987 campaign trail comment: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens,” George H. Bush said, “nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”

The Culture of Disbelief, by Yale Professor Stephen L. Carter, pointed out in 1993 that many devout parents see evil -- equally -- in “sex, drugs and secular humanism.”

That’s because, Tufts University Philosophy Professor Daniel C. Dennett said on C-Spann’s Book TV in early 2006, the idea has been “hammered” into us by defenders of the faith.

Even the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary gives, as its second definition of atheist, “… one who lives immorally as if disbelieving in God,” points out University of Pittsburgh’s Adolf Grunbaum. We can be sure “moral atheism” is heavily oxymoronic in America. Yet atheists say they know in their hearts they are just as moral as most believers and more so than many of them.

When we probe these ideas, we encounter Dostoyevsky in every book, article and Google:

“If there is no God, everything is permissible.”

The quote is usually attributed to the 19th century Russian novelist directly, but seems pieced together from the dialog of his fictional characters in Crime and Punishment and, most particularly, The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the question of the existence of God is the overriding theme. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) seems to have gone from socialist revolutionary to religious convert, but it is unclear whether he believed religion begets morality or a deep human need for a moral system leads to the founding of religions. His character’s opinions do not answer for him, any more than one could say Sir Arthur Conan Doyle approved of crime because his Professor Moriarity did.

A lot of people like the Dostoyevsky quote, however misattributed, believing it neatly explains the necessity of religion.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose radio talk show once topped national ratings and still has claims a weekly audience of 18 million, believes it takes God holding hell and damnation over our heads to make any of us eschew sin.

It’s a cheap view, according to Skeptic magazine’s founding publisher Michael Shermer, author of the The Science of Good and Evil. It says, “in effect, that people are naturally mean and nasty to each other…”

Author Mark I. Vuletic can’t picture everyone abandoning their children even if it were proved that God does not exist. “Christians seem to believe it is wrong to abandon their children only if God exists. Atheists believe it is wrong to abandon one’s children whether or not God exists, and that gives the atheist a much stronger moral foundation than the Christian.”

Schlessinger, nevertheless, sees nothing wrong in letting the Bible be her guide. She said she knows homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in Leviticus, third book of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Her comment inspired an open letter to her, anonymous but well-reproduced on the World Wide Web, which facetiously asks, then, how much to charge for a daughter one wants to sell into slavery, who should be obligated to stone the person to death who works on the Sabbath, and how to kill friends who get their hair trimmed…. all among the stipulations in Leviticus. No answer from Schlessinger has surfaced.

C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963) best known as author of the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels, was similarly unequivocal: “It has always seemed ridiculous to me for people to think that you can still have ‘morality,’ particularly Christian morality, without God.”

In a 1972 speech on morality, the Rev. Billy Graham, who has preached to more people than anyone in the history of religion, stopped short of saying atheists are immoral. But he did say: “Our freedom is based on law and this law has been rooted in a faith and universal moral law given by almighty God.”

“Morality begins with the character of God. There is no other foundation for it,” says Anglican clergyman and Cambridge theology graduate Dick Tripp of New Zealand. “He is holy, perfect in his love, in his justice, in his faithfulness, and any other ‘good’ quality you can think of.”

Some would disagree. Eminent English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) revealed in his autobiography in the mid 19th century, that his father thought religion was the greatest enemy of morality for the explicit reason that the character of God was not good or just.

Mill said his father thought religion vitiated the standard of morals by making them consist of doing the will of a being, “on whom it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts an eminently hateful.”

Eminent philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) came even earlier to the conclusion that morality derives from human experience and God does not implant morality. The pious man, Hume came to believe, would invariably turn out to be “a rascal.”

In The Impossibility of God, Michael Martin explains that God is called good while his behavior is undeniably bad. “That is, having purposes and acting on motives which in all ordinary circumstances we would recognize as bad. He is depicted as behaving in some respects as a malevolent demon, in others like a petulant tyrant, and in others like a mischievous and thoughtless child.”

Likewise, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, says he’s still surprised at the morality/religion link because history suggests otherwise.

“The Bible contains several injunctions from God to the Israelites to slay the occupants of the towns they covet,” Pinker writes in his essay “Evolution and Ethics” in the anthology Intelligent Thought. “…except for the young women, who they are to take as unwilling wives. Since then religions have given the world stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, jihads, fatwahs, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, child molesters, and mothers who drown their children so they can happily be reunited in Heaven.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote that witch burnings were not inconsistent with morality because, at the time, the witch hunters really believed in witchcraft and believed they were doing the right thing.

This would indicate that reasoning is okay, when it comes to figuring out what’s moral and what isn’t. But much of what we read about why religion is essential to morality is that its morality is absolute and handed down from above. No reasoning required.

That’s just the problem, Dennett wrote in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell “Those who have unquestioning faith …if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests of rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.”

Any “Good Book” followers who think, maybe, Mill, Martin, Pinker, and Dennett are full of it, can easily check out Bible tales, moral models and contradictions within at “Notes on Bible Problems” by Richard Packham at http://home.teleport.com/packham/bible.htm Take Moses for one example. Everyone knows and many honor Moses for handing down God’s Ten Commandments.

“The character of Moses is the most horrid….” writes religion scholar William Edelman. “Moses said (according to the Bible) ‘Kill every male among the little ones…and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him…but of all the women who have not known a man…keep alive for yourselves.” Were the women expected to have any right to object to being kidnapped and raped? The Bible doesn’t consider that a moral problem. Today, most of us would. Our laws so indicate.

Was the wretchedness of Moses an isolated case? Consider Abraham, whose marrying his sister and seducing her handmaid were his lesser crimes. Abraham drove one child and its mother into the desert to starve, drove out his other children and their mothers, and was willing to butcher his other child to please God.

Packham breaks it down for you by Bible characters or subjects, such as human sacrifice; animal sacrifice; war; genocide and slaughter; cruelty, barbarity and violence; deceit and treachery; lying; incest; extortion; cannibalism; slavery; drunkenness; religious intolerance and closed minds; polygamy and concubinage; prostitution; abuse of women and women’s inferiority; abandonment of wife, children and family; hypocrisy; homosexuality; and obscene, offensive and erotic passages.

It’s all in there.

God will punish David (II Sam 12:11-12) by giving his wives to another to enjoy in public view. What would Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority think of that spectacle? (Not to mention the morality of punishing the wife who hadn’t irked God in her own right.)

But, throughout the Bible God likes to punish people for the sins of others.

He likes to kill children.

In Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, Allen points out that God says, while making his commandments, “in what is supposed to be the moment of his most supremely important communication with the children of earth…that if a man does not happen to bow down before a religious picture he will not only punish that man, but also his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren!”

“It is nonsense for the Deity to describe that man or woman and perhaps hundreds of innocent offspring as “those who hate me.” Humans who make such statements are usually identified as suffering from severe paranoia. Why a god is supposed to be admired for so speaking is unclear.”

Atheists are atheists because they see no evidence for God. But they are buttressed in their views by the inconsistency, irrationality, and brutality of the Bible.

Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who thinks teaching children that there is a hell in which they might suffer eternal punishment is worse child abuse than a bit of fondling by a priest, despises the Catholic church’s “extraordinarily retrogressive stand on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church.”

Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in Why I Am Not A Christian, complained about the immorality of forcing women to bear child after child until they die worn out rather than approve contraceptives and birth control information. He saw the churches as retarding progress, mitigation of racial discrimination and slavery and “every moral progress there has been in the world.”

Allen wondered why the Catholic church never censured the Mafia or denied its members a Christian burial.

“I’ve known very few atheists,” Allen wrote, but, without exception they have been men and women or principle and admirable as citizens. Of the few truly despicable human beings I have encountered, I regret to report that almost every one of them was at least a nominal believer in one religion or another.

Oft-quoted early 20th century columnist H.L. Meneken (1880-1956) said religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”

Harris is impatient for the view to spread: “Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”

Science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), author of more than 500 books, said Bible believers ignore all the patient findings of thinking minds throughout the centuries since the Bible was written. “And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all…”

On the flip side, claiming super intelligence for atheists may be a stretch – for all except Dennett. Dennett has started a movement aimed at a new moniker for atheists – brights. Because they are ‘bright,” he thinks, atheists are living better lives.

“About the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights,” Dennett writes.

Of course, Dennett considers himself a bright and tells those offended by his elitism that they need to adjust their perspective.

What do the facts show?

There are many, examples of atheists living moral lives – honest, generous, law-abiding, compassionate -- but individual examples don’t prove anything –except that perhaps religious zealots should give a non-believer the benefit of the doubt. Rather, those who think Christianity or other religions, exclusively, deliver our morals, dismiss the good citizen atheists and moral humanists as isolated cases of people who will behave well for a short time, but only because they have absorbed the attitudes of a religion-saturated society.

They are wrong.

Not only are some good, moral atheists not rendered good and moral from living among believers, they are better.

And societies are better the more atheists they have!

What?

Social scientists using data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup, and other research bodies concluded, in general, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, sexually transmitted disease infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”

Also:

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

It is the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates are still high; with “uniquely high” teen abortion and syphilis, and adolescent gonorrhea 300 times higher than in less devout countries.

The report was authored by Gregory Paul and reported in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal.

Paul said evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggests that religion might actually contribute to social ills.

Falwell can say, “If you’re not a born-again Christian you’re a failure as a human being,” but born again Christians have a slightly higher divorce rates than non-Christians and find few atheists to room with in prisons.

Researcher George Bara, himself a born-again Christian, said Bible Belt Americans have the highest divorce rate and atheists and agnostics the lowest of all – although that may be due to other factors than religion, such as economic status. And don’t think those divorces happened then the couples sought religion. Bara said 90 percent of the divorces among born again come after the individuals in the marriages had their spiritual rebirths, not before. (religioustolerance.org)

Of course, marriage in the Bible does not impede a man’s right to take concubines. It is valid only if the wife is a virgin (and if not she must be killed). And a man must marry his brother’s widow. Stipulations that we don’t think the Moral Majority has in mind when it considers the sanctity of marriage.

Meanwhile, statistics show more atheists than God-fearers obey the Ten Commandments –at least the sensible ones – and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

At a time when slave holders were pointing out that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, Abraham Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” This is reasoning along the lines of the Golden Rule, which appears many millennia before Christianity. Most religions encorporate an ethic of reciprocity, but monotheistic ones, like Christianity and Judaism, teach that God’s whim trumps the Golden Rule.

Angier: “In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the “Jesus people” movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests that were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled.”

As this was being written, sociologist Phil Zuckerman was in Demark finishing up research for his upcoming book, Society Without Religion. As the title suggests, Zuckerman has looked at countries where atheism dominates.

His findings support Gregory Paul’s report.

“High degrees of non-belief clearly do not result in societal ruin, and vice versa,” Zuckerman said in a telephone interview.

Demark and Sweden in Europe and Vietnam and Japan in the Far East, have the lowest levels of religious belief in the world, Zuckerman said. They also have the lowest homicide, infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, and the highest wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality.

“I’m not saying atheism brings on societal health,’ Zuckerman said. “Societal health causes widespread atheism. Social insecurity equates with a widespread belief in God.

“From Muslim fundamentalism in Iran to Christian fundamentalism in Indiana, the argument is loudly trumpeted that belief in God is good for society and rejection of God is bad. That thesis is badly incorrect.”

Zuckerman is the author of An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (2003) and teaches at Pitzer College in California

Organic atheism, that is, atheism not state-imposed and enforced, is highest, he said, in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan. Atheism is virtually non-existent in Africa, South America, the Middle East and much of Asia.

Scandinavia doesn’t have high suicide or alcoholism, is lower on all the other indicators of societal pathology. Religion proponents will point to problems in atheist Russia, Zuckerman said, but there non-belief was imposed. “Totalitarian nations are always a nightmare,” he said, “regardless of religious faith or non-faith.”

If you ask someone in Denmark where the got their moral values, they will point to ancestral Christianity, Zuckerman said. But even at that, he said, they were pagan longer than they were Christian. Christianity came very late.

Zuckerman said he was surprised at the citizens’ “absolute indifference” to religion, even the possibility of a human soul. He asked doctors operating on a cadaver if they thought the deceased had a soul and they simply said they never thought about it.

His over-all finding: “In Scandinavia, people were committed to helping others, there was a general belief in being a good person. Society without strong religion is not only possible, but quite pleasant.”

If atheists have morals but they aren’t derived from Christian, Jewish or Muslim teachings, from who or what do they derive?

The answer will not please fundamentalist believers: Evolution.

The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology says we get our morals from our animal ancestors.

“Profoundly, neurology tells us that we are born with an ability to be moral thanks to evolution,” wrote Dorion Sagan and John Skoyles in Up From Dragons. “We have not just a sense or right and wrong but, as important, a concern with ethics….We did not evolve from animals that were solitary and met only for mating, disappearing for the rest of the year from each other’s sight. We evolved from apes that had to find a way to live together. We thus need to share socially predictable ways of doing things. This, of course does not mean we cannot be self-oriented in our actions. We are out to get the best for ourselves; behind social cooperation is social competition. But we do this like other apes, against a background of finding ways to live and work together in our social group….a world governed by ‘oughts.’”

In The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, Richard Wright says the evolutionary mandate that created morality was the need to get our genes into the next generation.p 325 A mother who takes good care of her children is more likely to have them survive. Thus, good mothers get their genes passed on.

“What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right” – morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good serve reward and doers of evil deserve punishment – all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.”

Emperor Penguins, for instance, huddle together during the worst weather. Those on the outer edge of the huddle, exposed to the worst blasts of icy artic air, are rotated into the middle of the group periodically, so the burden of the outer edge is shared. All in the group survive, and that is better for all.

Empathy seems to increase as organisms become more intelligent, as one can see in the behavior of higher mammals, says New Age writer Barbara Marx Hubbard, who many regard as heir to visionary Buckminster Fuller. The process of evolution began and proceeded for million of years without organized religion, she said, and will continue beyond any organized religion into the ever-evolving future. Only now, man has progressed to the point where he can effect the direction of his change, she writes in her book, Conscious Evolution. “Humans are bringing more humaneness into the process.”

But that, too, may be just evolution at work. The more we learn about what causes human behavior, says psychiatrist Armando Favazza, the more we diminish the concept of free will and the concept of sin depends on free will. Favazza is the author of PsychoBible: Behavior, Religion and the Holy Book.

Once humans began to write, they wrote about morality. Plato and Socrates, certainly, discussed morality.

Religion, says author Salman Rushdie, was a way of codifying morality already established before humans gave up multiple gods and myths.

Rushdie, who knows how dangerous religious “morals” can be, having had to live about 10 years of his life in hiding due to an Islamic fatwah issued against him for ostensibly insulting the faith in his book The Satanic Verses, said morality is independent of religion.

But what is it, really?

If morality isn’t “what God wants,” how do we define morality?

Humanist Jennifer Hancock says secular humanist define it as acting with compassion toward others. Oh, sure, honesty and responsibility are often mentioned as elements of morality, she says. “But if you say honest and responsible, you’ve described Hitler,” Hancock says. “Compassion is the essential element.”

Moslems complain that the Scandinavians are promiscuous, but by the standard of compassion, sex between the consenting doesn’t rank as immoral. Beheading foreigners does.

Humanistic ethics considers choices regarding shared human interests, wants, needs and values, writes American Humanist Association founder Paul Kurtz. “We judge them by their consequences for human happiness and social justice.” Humanists agree to support: the dignity and autonomy of individuals; self-determination and freedom exercised responsibly; pursuit of excellence; carrying out responsibilities and duties to others; exercising empathy and caring; providing moral education for the young; use of reasoning in framing ethical judgments; willingness to modify ethical principles in the light of reality and new discovery; and respect for principles – the end does not justify the means. (see The Humanist Manifesto 2000)

It might surprise many to find out that Mother Teresa, who was made a Saint for her supposed selfless care of others, believed that suffering was a good thing and did not go out of her way to alleviate pain. She collected vast sums in donations, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, and did not spend it on the poor and medically needy. Her care facilities were grotesquely primitive, platforms for proselytizing not healing, Hitchens wrote in his 1995 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also criticized Mother Teresa for helping tyrannical dictatorships like that of the Duvaliers in Haiti, taking money from swindler Charles Keating, and maintaining a double standard on divorce – no good for the Irish, but okay for her friend Princess Diana. And when she needed medical care she took herself to fancy clinics in California.

Matt Cherry of the Council for Secular Humanism, said Mother Teresa compares unfavorably with an atheist doctor Indumati Parikh, who sold her home in a middle class are of Bombay to open a clinic in a slum area and lived and worked among the poor for the next forty years. She brought not only medical care but education to the poor, and brought down the birth rate by improving the infant mortality. Mother Teresa took care of her image, Cherry said, Dr. Parikh took care of people. In convincing us that religious people own morality, religion has performed an amazing sleight of hand, Cherry said.

Schermer defines morality as “right and wrong thoughts and behaviors in the context of the rules of the social group.”

But what happens when divergent social groups cross paths? In Mogadishu, Somalia, today a judge will impose a death sentence on anyone who doesn’t pray daily. Moral for them; immoral to us.

“Morality is simply the avoidance of unnecessary harm,’ says ex-preacher Dan Barker, now a staff member of the Freedom From Relgion Foundation. “If we minimize pain and enhance the quality of life, we are moral,” Barker said. To be moral, atheists have access to the simple tools of reason and kindness. There is no cosmic code book directing our actions,”

Rushdie said morality is that which is intrinsic within us which wishes to distinguish right from wrong. It’s hardwired in us. “Religion is one of the answers,” he said, “but it’s perfectly possible for me to say we can create codes to live by. One is democracy. We continue to argue what’s okay and what’s not. Slavery at one point was okay. It’s not anymore. Women were not allowed to own property, now they are.”

Times change, technology develops and so we evolve. And so does morality. This is one of the big problems with trying to impose a morality with codes written thousands of years ago, even if they were not internally contradictory. Could the Bible address the problem of how to decide the fate of frozen embryos whose parents have died? Does the Koran say women shouldn’t drive, or, more importantly, should be denied modern medical care because the doctor is a male? Could any ancient religious text say if separating Siamese twins who share a heart is taking a life or allowing one? If we should colonize Mars?

The only way to look at these issues is from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Sometimes it isn’t easy. Moral dilemmas abound. It was easier when we lived in more homogenous, socially isolated groups. But we are a global society now. If we look to religion for our morals, we will have only conflict, because religions don’t agree.
If one religion says it is necessary to stone someone to death for kissing on a beach, and we take the position of honoring all religions, then we must allow that. But reasoning individuals will see that normal human activity is not criminal, and even criminality may not deserve the death penalty.

No one wants “everything” to be permissible. We want to be secure in our homes, free from fear of violence. We do not want to be enslaved, we want to be able to accumulate possessions without concern they will be stolen. We recognize the need for laws and a justice system.

But, as Pinker says, neither scientists nor defender of religion should accept the premise that morality belongs in the province of religion. In practice, religions have sanctioned vile acts throughout human history. In principle, there is no reason to believe religious edicts are inherently moral or that they foster morality, and some reason to believe they have the opposite effect…the recurrence of atrocities committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions.”
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“Moral progress over the millennia,” Pinker adds, is explainable in terms of circumstances that encourage people to project themselves into the lives of others and hence expand the circle of empathy.”

We will see this circle grow beyond other cultures. We already have expanded it to the animal kingdom to the credit of the animal rights movement. A hundred or two years hence we may find we are more akin to the Star Trek universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, with empathy for alien life forms, androids, humanistic holograms, and a even a ship showing budding sentience. And as Arthur C. Clarke was fond of reminding us, what we can imagine is probably already on the way. There will be things we haven’t imagined that will strike from out of the blue.

Only knowledge can prepare us.

“The way to be moral is to learn what causes harm and how to avoid it,” Barker says. This means investigating nature: who we are and what we need, where we live, how we function, and why we behave the way we do. This gives an objective basis to morality, even though the values themselves are not objective things.

As we know, one of religions’ claims is to have “objective” morality. This claim is nonsense. Even “thou shalt not kill” has its myriad of exceptions, under religion, not the least of them the edict to kill non-believers, former believers, and those who believe in other religions or even sects of the same religion.

There is no objective morality, Dr. Laura. There never has been and never can be standards that remain true no matter what the circumstances. The criticism of “relativism” or “situational ethics,” therefore, is not legitimate. You would tell a lie not to hurt someone’s feelings, steal food to save a starving child, shoot down a killer before he kills more, etc. Those are the easy ones. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did the atomic bomb drops on Japan at ending the World War II in the Pacific save more or kill more? Would you be here today if your father or grandfather had been needed for a foot-soldier invasion of Japan? Would your Japanese daughter-in-law? Are all lives equal? Should we consider a brain surgeon worth more than a rock musician? An athlete more valuable than a stay-at-home mom? How about a seeing-eye dog compared to an unemployed drifter? Irradicating a pest that destroys food crops against causing an environmental imbalance?

Some times, discerning the compassionate act, or the right action, is terribly, terribly difficult.

Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, says no one should be killed –ever. But we live in a world of dangerous forces. “I hate to think of the idea of preemptive war,” Bloom says, “but we are forced to think of it.”

The best hope for answering the moral questions we face now and in the future comes from science, That’s why the current trend of disdaining science in America is disturbing.

Eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, writes that there is “something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternate view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”

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