Religion's parasitic morality

Are atheists parasitic on god's morality, or is it the other way around...?

I think the most common argument for the existence of god, outside of the apparent 'design' of the universe, must be that without god there can be no morality. Now, I don't intend to walk the path of my betters by explaining why it is perfectly reasonable to think morality has naturalistic origins; rather I would like to address a subclass of the argument that goes along the following lines.

God is the source of all morality, therefore without god we cannot be moral (i.e. god is a necessary condition for morality). Atheists, secular humanists and the like are parasitic upon god's moral foundation by living their moral nature without accepting its origin in god.

Interestingly, this is one of the few variations of the 'god = morality' arguments that doesn't doom atheists as fiends with no moral direction. Most of them point of course to the great 'atheist' evils of the 20th century such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and their ilk; drawing the conclusion that, lacking religious roots and unshackled from the constraints of god's benign guidance, these monsters demonstrate the consequences of the ethical vacuum that is atheism (I'll leave the issue of the true nature of these regimes for another time). At least in the above version, the non-religious are allowed their moral nature.

So then, what's my beef with this otherwise harmless piece of appeasement? Why not just take it as further evidence of the watering down of doctrinal biases and embrace it for the ground-giving that it seemingly is? Well, first and foremost, because it provides us with an exceptionally elegant way of demonstrating that the reverse is in fact true, and it is religion that is parasitic on our evolved morality.

This point of view would hardly be surprising to those already swayed by the efforts of Dawkins, Dennett and their contemporaries to provide an evolutionary description of the human tendency to behave, by and large, in an ethical way; I mean, what other way is there to explain religion's claim? True enough, but I'd like to show in a straightforward manner why the claim falls apart as a direct consequence of reading the bible. And yes, it's good old Leviticus...

I guess most of us have read, at one time or another, the intriguing passage

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination." (Leviticus 18:22)

or perhaps

"If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)

Well, I guess that's pretty clear. Stone gays to death. Of course, what's really interesting about biblical morality is that it has zero ethical basis. Most of us will try in some way to outline an ethical framework based on some axiomatic propositions such as 'the greatest good for the greatest number' or 'our ultimate goal is a society with properties X, Y and Z' and we reason from there – this is what we mean by an ethical theory. Biblical ethicist are spared this inconvenience. Good acts are those that god says we should perform. Not killing, not having false idols, slaughtering children – all sanctioned, good acts for a particular time and place. In fact, if you refuse to kill children when god says to, I get the impression this would make you evil, but I'll let the theologians clear up that point for me.

So, in that context let's look at more gems from Leviticus.

"For everyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother. His blood shall be upon him." (Leviticus 20:9)

"If a man lies with a woman during her sickness and uncovers her nakedness, he has discovered her flow, and she has uncovered the flow of her blood. Both of them shall be cut off from her people." (Leviticus 20:18)

"Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property." (Leviticus 25:44-45)

"...and the swine, though it divides the hoof, having cloven hooves, yet does not chew the cud, is unclean to you." (Leviticus 11:7)

"But all in the seas or in the rivers that do not have fins and scales, all that move in the water or any living thing which is in the water, they are an abomination to you." (Leviticus 11:10)

Hard to choose, but I really like the last one, if only for the absurdist feel to it. I guess when god saw all that he had made it must have been something like 'and he beheld what he had brought forth, and he saw that it was good (except for those damn prawns - how the hell did they get in there? Oh well, I'll just make sure no-one goes near them and shell, I mean she'll, be right).'

Given this plethora of punishable pastimes, and taking on board the biblical definition of a good act as one that god says we should do, then it's easy to imagine a lifetime spent walking on eggshells (certainly not crab shells – sorry, I'll stop now) hoping that in some utterly trivial way you don't transgress one of these decidedly written rules and doom yourself to damnation. Particularly when your own sense of morality provides such a poor guide to living (would we recognise eating shellfish as morally wrong if we had never heard of the commandment?). Certainly vast numbers of people have lived like this in the past, and just as many have been as keen to punish those who didn't pass moral muster.

Nowadays most believers, leaving out fundamentalists of all flavours, just don't live this way. But why not? The passages are clear enough. It's not like we can say that Jesus came along and said 'Oh, no! He never meant that.' In fact Jesus clearly said not one jot of the law was to be changed.

'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.' (Matthew 5:17-18)

So, where does that leave us? We have a non-ethical morality that depends for its grounding on the word of god only and which clearly contradicts our moral instincts. It won't do to say that the differences between what we naturally feel to be right and biblical law are a result of our being unguided or misguided, as if that were true then Christians, for example, would be following the above passages to the letter, stoning children and adulterers every Sunday in the park (or I guess maybe Monday, Sunday being the sabbath and all). No, the only conclusion, and the point of this essay, is that we use our extant morality to determine which bits of religious texts are those we should follow and which bits are those we should ignore. Religion uses the morality we already have to try and buttress its claims to deep truths. The mismatch between natural and biblical morality is a consequence of the attempt to mold our existing feelings of what is right and wrong into a power structure that wants to hijack our own nature and claim it for itself - it is parasitic on our naturally evolved sense of morality.

by Peter Ellerton

Reposted from

http://pactiss.org:8080/ct/critica/religions-parasitic-morality