Received 7.23.2001

Closet Atheist,

The common sense of your essay, "Debunking the Religious Monopoly on Morality", was a breath of fresh air, as is most of your site.

I too am familiar with the question posed by Christians: "Without God, how can man know the difference between right and wrong?" As soon as one's non-believing status is known, one's morality and trustworthiness as a human being are instantly called into question. 

You countered with the reasonable reply, "As long as man can recognize the difference between being treated rightly and wrongly, he will know the difference between right and wrong."

And that is the reason why (fundamentalist) religion as a basis of human behavior is morally inferior: Religion deliberately trains people to shun empathy, teaches them to care only how the exercise of their particular religious preferences are treated and not how other people are treated, teaches them only to care about prescribed behaviors and not their affects on others. How they can spout "do unto others" and then in fact do unto 
others precisely what they would not tolerate having done unto them, boggles the mind. Religion has stripped people of understanding what being treated rightly and wrongly is all about. They cannot conceive of others having natural empathy which they themselves do not. That is why they cannot conceive of morality outside of their system.

Thanks for a great site.

Bari

My Reply:

I think that on an interpersonal level, generally everyone knows the difference between right and wrong, but people attribute this knowledge to different things. Christians will say the teachings of Jesus are responsible, for Hindus it may be Ganesha or Vishnu, for the ancient Egyptians perhaps it was Osiris. All convey a similar message of respecting other community members and their property.

In my essay I argue that love is key to survival because it creates families, which are really small "survival communities." Families which protected their members better or loved better, survived better and passed on their genes.  Nobody had to read the Bible to learn that they should care for their children or spouses.

Government and religion are macrocosmic versions of families, they are our projections of what we instinctively know about successful group behavior. It makes sense that earlier forms of government, such as monarchies, more closely resemble a family structure than more evolved forms of government. But, while governments live or die, and therefore evolve, according to how well they perform, religions need only not be disproven. Why else would all supernatural beings be invisible? Consequently, most religions still very closely resemble the family structure. A patriarchal deity enforces the rules much like a monarch or father in a family.

My point is that I think religions document what people instinctively already know about morality from the evolution of the family, hence most religions share similar core values. But beyond these core values of respecting others and their property, religions have their own agendas-- unrelated rules such as mandatory worship and the condemnation of other religious views and homosexuality.

Of course, knowing the difference between right and wrong doesn't mean that some people won't choose the wrong path. It just means that those who chose the wrong path didn't do so because they simply didn't know any better.

This is one of the reasons I find the idea of posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms to stop school violence so ludicrous. The children who committed those atrocious crimes did so precisely because they knew they were wrong. They were knowingly committing the ultimate act of outrage-- a violent expression of their anguish and frustration that would fill every parent in the country with fear.

Can you imagine one of those young, angry boys seeing a copy of the Ten Commandments printed on faux parchment in a high school display case and saying, "Killing my classmates is wrong? I didn't know!"