Conversations with Christians:
“I am an atheist.”
“So, you don’t believe in sin then?”
Morality is a human construct. It
has no absolute, tangible reality; it is purely a fabrication of the human
mind, crafted and honed after generations of experience and emotive
development. Fortunately, it is a rather useful human construct that does much
to maintain peace and order. It’s hard to imagine anybody who would disagree—even
psychopaths acknowledge its power. Indeed, it is their love for promulgating
chaos that leads them to defying morality all together. Because morality is
catholic (although unique and relative, to some extent, to every individual),
it is a tempting bit of evidence to point to the existence of a creator, a
deity, a god. However, I intend here to lay that temptation to rest once and
for all by explaining an alternative source for morality. I base it on my own
experience and welcome responses from anyone who may agree or disagree.
The key to understanding how a human
comes to label any action as moral or immoral, oddly enough, lies within the
so-called “Golden Rule.” This “rule” that is so ubiquitous throughout the
religious/mythological world—“treat others as you would like to be treated”—need
not come from a deity (or a group of deities, for that matter) in order to be
explained. Indeed, it is no stretch of the imagination to posit that the same
minds that have come to untangle the mysteries of gravity or evolution were
able in more primitive forms to discover a sentiment universally felt and
accepted. It did not need to be (and it indeed was not) revealed to humanity
through divine intervention but through rationalization, emotions, reflection, and
empathy.
To start, it is useful to consider
what is often cited as the quintessential moral issue: murder. No rational,
emotionally-developed human being will make the case for the virtues of murder,
precisely because it is so atrocious on even a global scale. But murder is not
bad because Yahweh, Zeus, Allah, or Vishnu says it is so. Murder is bad,
immoral, because of how it makes people feel.
The human imagination is a
remarkable vessel for compassion and for manifesting glimpses of purely
fabricated situations. In fact, the latter skill is a particularly potent one
humans possess, as demonstrated in our ability to experience dreams while we
sleep, recall from memory rather vividly a loved-one’s face, or even just
imagine the taste of a vanilla ice cream cone. How these processes occur is not
yet fully understood, but that it does occur is obvious and has been one of
life’s great mysteries for millennia.
To prove my overarching point, let’s
devise a brief thought experiment. Unpleasant though it may be, close your eyes
and try to imagine a scenario where someone whom you love very much has been
killed. It need not even be from murder. Or, if this is an experience you’ve
had already, you may try to recall the precise feeling you had when you were
first broken the news and the subsequent sentiment that no doubt lingered on
your mind for a very long time after. The feelings you are presently
experiencing are not unique. Our human faculty of empathy allows us to
powerfully experience in our minds both things we’ve never encountered and
events we have already met with in our lives. This fact is central to
understanding my conception of how morality arose and how I as an atheist have
shaped my own understanding of morality.
I do not kill people precisely
because I would not want someone else to kill me or someone I care about.
Although I suppose I would not be aware of my own death if someone were to kill
me, I can consider now, while still alive, how the murderer would have cut
short my small sliver of allotted time to live, experience, and love. The very
notion of my murder thus affects me deeply due to the sheer ignorance and cruelty
of the committer. Moreover, when I consider (selfishly, I admit) the pain I
would experience upon having anyone important to me wrenched from my life, it
exacts a visceral response deep within me. My sense of empathy prevents me from
doing anything I would not want done to myself.
It’s pretty easy to see, then, how
even a primitive human mind could arrive at such basic moral understandings as
the wrongness of murder, rape, or theft, purely through reflection upon one’s
own feelings. That is not to say that all primitive humans stumbled upon this
understanding, but at least one human did and likely shared it with his or her
peers. What’s important to grasp is that this knowledge did not come from some
outside force but from humanity itself. Very likely, it came from real
experience and empathy, not from imagination at all. With the human mind’s
impressive ability to assimilate facts into knowledge and comprehension, it
seems very probable indeed that the first person to acknowledge the
wrongfulness, the immorality of any action, was a victim of that very action.
Beautifully, empathy does not merely
restrain one from committing heinous acts. To the contrary, it encourages
benevolent behavior. If one avoids bad deeds out of fear of reciprocation, then
it follows that one also will actively share good deeds in hope of
reciprocation. It may be simple to make the case then that all good deeds are
committed selfishly in order to promulgate an economy of good deeds in the
hopes that some will spring back upon the self. However, the same argument
could easily be made (and rather frequently has been made) that religious
morality and charity are simply the carrying out of duty in hopes of reward
from a deity. It’s impossible to get around this conundrum, for even if one
should say that good deeds are inherently good, it is really the good feeling
that comes along with them that makes them occur at all.
Fortunately, this age-old paradox
isn’t that troubling at all. In fact, it helps further my suggestion that
morality is based on emotions. The same primitive minds that conceived of the
pain caused by murder that decided to not murder in order to avoid
reciprocation likely stumbled upon the truth that kindness often propagates
kindness. Over time, these two basic truths—cruelty begets cruelty, benevolence
begets benevolence—came to be expressed in various mythologies the world around
via the Golden Rule. Consequently, I believe that humanity does not possess
morality because of religion, but that religion possesses morality (albeit, often
perverted) because of humans. This question is no “chicken or the egg” paradox,
but a very easily-understood anthropological phenomenon. Humans invented
morality, and then they invented religion as a source of higher authority for
that morality. Religion was likely invented, at least in part, as a safeguard
to maintain and enact this economy of kindness and agreement to avoid immorality.
Interestingly, I posit that it is
precisely this introduction of religion to enforce morality that both spread basic
moral codes and ultimately corrupted the essence of morality. The threat of
punishment by a supreme deity or by supreme deities would certainly keep a
less-sophisticated mind from committing so-called “immoral deeds,” and it did a
fine job of doing so for a very long time, I admit. In some respects, it
continues to do so today. But various other rules became introduced over time
that lack any moral basis—kosher laws and circumcision are perfect examples
from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These laws, some suggest, were introduced
in response to legitimate dangers in the world (for example, shellfish may have
been banned as a result of food poisoning, and a circumcised penis is much healthier
for both genders in a society lacking sophisticated hygiene techniques). Moral
code thus became a useful survival tool, but something much less founded on
morality (Richard Dawkins suggests that this use of religion as a survival tool
is precisely why religion itself has survived—the tribes that had religious
laws preventing them from harm were more likely to survive than those without
it, and thus, more likely to reproduce and pass on their moral codes). Worse,
political groups eventually grew to recognize how easily religion could be
exploited to maintain order and control; the Roman Empire’s adoption of
Christianity is a clear, famous example.
When government became involved in
religion, moral law began to lose its utility. The cause is a tendency of
politicians to line their own coffers while “representing” the people, as can
still be seen today in pork-barrel laws or accommodations politicians make for
powerful lobbyists. I see no reason to believe that such a practice is new, nor
to deny that it had a hand in crafting many of the more bizarre laws found in
various religious codes. Moreover, scientific advancements and fuller
medical/anatomical understandings have done much to render many old religious
laws obsolete. Unfortunately, many have survived on tradition alone, not on
logic or emotion at all. Often, this survival can be dangerous to a society.
In closing, it’s time humanity bind together
to produce a universal moral code based on empathy alone. No more should we
tolerate a world that incites religious wars and acts of terror. No more should
we tolerate a world that punishes a woman for revealing too much flesh. No more
should we tolerate a world that challenges the importance of rational thought
and skepticism in favor of blind faith instead. It’s time to shake off the clingy
stain of religion-based morality in lieu of something progressive, logical, and
based entirely on empathy alone. Such a change would lead to impressive,
desperately-needed social and political changes. The only path to a truly moral
world is to finally give up on the gods.
