[EN] No basis for morality?

Posted on March 23, 2012
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This was originally a Google+ post comment (about “an atheist cannot be moral because without religion there is no basis for moral judgments”) that turned into a nice little rant.

Basic human morality has nothing to do with religion. If that were the case, I, as a life-long atheist who was never indoctrinated by religion, would not be moral, would not be able to discern between right or wrong. I would be in prison, hunted down, or dead. And we all know who are actually in prison… and who touch the little boys …. and who lie and cheat throughout their presidential campaigns .. and who reject science because it doesn’t fit their outdated world view.

Morality based on religion? My ass. There’s nothing more hateful and bigoted than a religious society. Give me an atheist anytime, give me a secular society always. At least I know they have their own innate morality, not an indoctrinated set of Stone Age rules that totally cloud their own healthy human judgment. At least I know that these people, that these societies, will take responsibility for their own actions, every single time, not trying to appeal to some “higher authority”, let alone some “immutable Truth” — the most dangerous and lethal concepts in human history.

Again: morality existed before it was written down and frozen in time. Morality has evolved ever since, and the fact that “Christians” are denouncing the horrible, bloody, hateful, misogynistic, inhuman, and inhumane Old Testament (basically denouncing their God) shows that this idea of a frozen morality that should rule mankind forever is a worthless and valueless piece of shit, and the sooner we kick that entire book out the better. Talk about meaningless.

If you start murdering people the moment you lose your “religious morality” that says everything about you as a human being. So long as you cannot see that morality is deeply ingrained in all of humanity, that humans who have never known religion are entirely moral and decent, and that religion is in no way the mandatory facilitating factor in that humanity-morality connection, but in fact a highly damaging and regressive and noxious tribal artifact, you will never get how quaint, awkward, and even backward, your “religion=morality” comments are.

So where does morality come from? Lessons learnt from human evolutionary processes. Certain types of behavior advanced the species and its well-being. This evolved into a sense of what was right and wrong (for the species), a sense of morality (of mores, simply habits and behavior, that worked well). No fixed morals, morals that changed over time, responding to changing circumstances, needs, social developments (like societies settling down with the advent of agriculture, market towns, cities, scientific progress, etcetera).

Not exactly a big secret, dude. Nothing to do with a religious “basis for everything”. Religion did play a role for a while in human evolution, abating fear, trying to explain phenomena that no one could understand yet, and providing a sense of togetherness by using a common focal point, and no one denies that. But its role is now over for any modern society.

It’s not needed any longer, and more and more countries (esp, Europe) show this to be a beneficial turn of events. The figures that are consistently correlating secularism with things that humans hold dear, from health, to wealth, to civil liberties and higher life expectancy, lower child mortality rates, higher rates of literacy, lower crime rates, etc. etc. etc. should speak volumes.

Religion has had its chance, but no one needs the Dark Ages any more.