Morality: no gods required

This was a great article. I have known since I was 12 that religion is not a guarantee of moral behavior and nothing has changed my mind in the intervening half century. This was an excellent explanation of the concept.

In my experience, instead of causing people to "love one another" religion pulls people apart by creating sects that may reluctantly tolerate each other at best, hate each other at worst. Even the priests of six denominations at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of Christianity's holiest sites in Jerusalem, have frequent physical battles over things as mundane as who has the right to clean a particular step. These disputes have been going on for over 800 years.

When my local area was plagued with accusations of sexual abuse by priests, a great article by a psychologist who treated some of them suggested that pedophiles didn't choose to become priests to have access to children nor did they become pedophiles because they couldn't marry (popular opinions at the time) but chose to become priests because they knew they had a problem and thought if they became priests ---if they prayed enough, if they were pious enough ---they would be cured. Obviously no amount of piety helps.

If someone who immerses himself in religion exhibits immoral behavior, run-of-the-mill religious folk certainly aren't going to behave any better than the nonbeliever. Obviously some of those who preach about sin and think about it all the time, become fascinated by it ---Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard come to mind.

Excellent post and timely. Religion certainly doesn't have a monopoly on morality and it is time for theists to stop claiming that it does. A cursory glance at any crime blotter is proof enough that theists break the rules as much if not more than anyone else. Of course the Christian would argue that they are not True Christians (TM).

The Charles Dickens question is "pithy", but I think it would be better to ask if there can be any such thing as good literature given that nobody in particular invented language. That would be on par with the creationist question of whether there can be morality without a top-down designer of life.

Fortunately for the world, science has successfully undermined the simpleminded religions - the Abrahamic cults, mainly Christianity and Islam.

Christianity and Islam have had a good 2000 year run preying on ignorance and the ignorant. This ended for Christianity in Europe with the development of science. It is now looking for the ignorant and uneducated in Africa and South America.

Islam - a strange combination of ignorance and intolerance - has been picking the lowest lying fruit for a 1000 years as apparent in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now is the time for science, logic, and deeper & truer spirituality - not supremacist, intolerant cults like Christianity and Islam that proselytize and force their views on others. This results in conflict, violence, and suffering.

Now is the time for Vedanta & Hinduism. After 1000 years of anti-Hindu propaganda, many are not prepared to hear the wisdom or absorb the deep & complex monistic philosophy which is consistent with science. Now is a good time to start; at least some will benefit.

A new age of rational spirituality is again arriving, and Hinduism and Vedanta will lead the way again.

According to the Jewish biblical scholar Geza Vermes, in the earliest days of Judaism there was no belief in life after death, heaven or hell: they believed the claim in Deuteronomy that the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked punished during their lifetimes. It was only later, when it became patently obvious that this wasn't the case, that some Jews started to think that the promised reward or retribution must come after death. And so the Abrahamic tradition of heaven and hell was born - and was tremendously convenient to those trying to govern the masses, of course, because it declared: 'Don't even think of breaking the law, because even if we don't get you, God will.'
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Ah, Vermes didn't quite say this with respect to Judaism and the afterlife. There is no "Abrahamic tradition" of either an afterlife or anything else. The "Abrhamic Religions," which to not exist, was a myth authored by the previous pope, in the interest of feel-goodism and, with respect to Judaism, Catholicism's self-legitimation.

To this day, Jews make little of the afterlife. Mention, when it does come up, occurs during funerals. Not too long ago, there was a TV show exploring the afterlife in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Imams, priests, ministers, laypeople gave lengthy descriptions, explanations of how it motivates believers to do good, etc.

The rabbi had one thing to say: Nothing. And then this: You do not do good so that you will get a reward in the afterlife. The very notion angered him, perhaps because the moderator asked it in one way or another, over and over again.

A lot of fuzzy thinking about these three religions comes from this papal "Abrahamic" nonsense.

"There is an evolutionary explanation for this: we are dependent for our survival and well-being on the people around us. Most of us survive best when we are living harmoniously with others (i.e. not stealing, not killing, not harming them avoidably). Doing otherwise can have negative consequences: loss of life in some societies, loss of freedom in most, loss of respect and good standing in all. And most of us survive best when the people around us respect and like us, for the obvious reason that they are then more likely to help us if we need them to."

Within our communities, or tribes, this is certainly true but it does not hold for inter tribal behavior, in which lying, cheating, stealing and even killing are tolerated or encouraged. This is the evolutionary legacy that threatens us and only a spiritual solution will suffice to give us strength to overcome it or we ride our evolutionary psychology to our doom.

What utter nonsense! To borrow from Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga (when commenting on Richard Dawkins' philosophical prowess), I'd say that Ms. Kirby is sophomoric, but that would be an insult to sophomores. Oh, and Ms. Kirby, the Bible makes it clear that all who have truly come to Christ (that is, after all, what it means to be a Christian) will never depart from the faith -- that's something, the Bible says, that God makes certain of. Therefore, you aren't, as it says above, a former Christian -- perhaps a former Christian poser, but not a former Christian.

Over all I agree. But there is a problem (a good one though). Sometimes, all too rarely unfortunately, the idea of good changes and somehow we can all tap into that innovation and say - yes. Gandhi, MLK, the abolitionists, a tiger that suckles a baby ape. That tap taps into something fundamentally real. It could be evolutionary, but it means that there is an evolutionary trait that lies deep within us that can be expounded upon more over the evolution of societies. If that evolutionary trait has not expressed itself yet, then it can not affect selection / reproduction. It must be a trait transcendent to selection (at least as a phenotype but probably as a genotype as well). This points to another force in evolution (emanation) beside reproductive selection (for convenience you and I may call it the Truth underlying life or perhaps even Brahman or God).

hariaum