Does atheist morality come from an innate and natural sense of morality that is common to all animals?

A large part of religion is about following a specific moral code which is usually set out in the scriptures of every religion but a “natural morality” can be shown to exist that is apart from any particular doctrine. Different religions share many common moral values but few religions share exactly the same set of morals with others. Anglicans have no restriction on what meats they may eat but both Jews and Muslims may not eat pork and Hindus don’t eat cows.

It is easy to see that some religious moral codes have developed for logistical reasons. Dairy products are many and a cow’s value over its lifetime is more than the immediate value of the meat. Pork spoils very quickly in high temperatures and is hard to preserve without refrigeration.

There are many horrible moral practices in both the Old and New Testament’s but modern-day Christians do not follow the most abhorrent ones. Instead they cherry-pick the “good” ones and then call their whole moral code “Christian” when this is patently not true.

Surely in order to cherry-pick one must use a moral code that is separate from that of the religion; a moral code that might be called a “natural” one. Otherwise what determines which values are kept and which are discarded.

An article in the Telegraph published in May of this year suggests that animals have morals but if religion were the only moral compass wouldn’t animals have to have religion for that to be true? I somehow doubt that any animals have religion so where do they get their sense of moral values from? Is there a way of behaving that could be called “natural”?

“Experiments with rats have shown that they will not take food if they know their actions will cause pain to another rat.”

“Experiments with domestic dogs, where one animal was given a treat and another denied, have shown that they posses a sense of fairness as they shared their treats.”

“A laboratory experiment trained Diana monkeys to insert a token into a slot to obtain food. A male who had grown to be adept at the task was found to be helping the oldest female who had not been able to learn how to insert the token. On three occasion the male monkey picked up tokens she dropped and inserted them into the slot and allowed her to have the food. As there was no benefit for the male monkey [it could be argued] that this is a clear example of an animal’s actions being driven by some internal moral compass.”

There is also evidence to show that morals can cross species divisions:

“In 2003, a herd of 11 elephants rescued antelope who were being held inside an enclosure in KwaZula-Natal, South Africa. The matriarch unfastened all of the metal latches holding the gates closed and swung the entrance open allowing the antelope to escape.”

Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure and that kills its own kind purely because of disagreement (i.e. politics). Yes, other animals do kill their own kind but only when there is an overall good survival reason to do so. However, even those humans who kill other humans have an in-built knowledge that killing other human beings is wrong. They may justify their killing with flimsy reasoning but they still normally have a sense that what they have done is wrong. The only exception to this is when brain damage has occurred (as in the case of abnormal sociopathic or psychopathic behaviour).

I would argue that not only do we not need religion to tell us what is right or wrong but that some moral values of religion itself can cause normal human beings to override their natural sense of morality. It is this mechanism that is responsible for a suicide bomber believing that he is somehow doing a “good thing” when he pushes his trigger button.

In the same way that anything else is discussed why is it not considered important for the peoples of the Earth to come together and agree on common moral values using their natural sense of morality as a basis? We could reach consensus for all the important “big” stuff while still leaving room for individual local “by-laws”.

See:
“Animals can tell right from wrong” (Telegraph 23.05.09)

Related posts:
“Atheist morals. Are atheists “bad people” just because they are atheists?” (TEWNC 17.08.09)

Filed under: Atheism, Morals

“I do get depressed when I see children coming out as evolution deniers. I don’t think they would have 30 years ago.” (Richard Dawkins)

The Greatest Show on Earth

I’m looking forward to reading Dawkins’ new book “The Greatest Show on Earth” when it hits the bookshelves in October but I can’t help thinking that it will be difficult for him to achieve one of his stated goals; to change Islam. He says:

“While most non-fundamentalist Christian traditions have largely accepted evolution, Islam was still much more hostile … It’s the fact that Islam teaches the Koran is the literal word of God, unlike most Christian sects, which say the Bible is largely symbolic.”

While he admits to the uphill battle when it comes to a change of Islamic consciousness, he does nevertheless have high hopes of roping in a significant Islamic audience.

“To be a best-seller in a Muslim country would be a personal triumph … anybody who reads it should no longer be capable of thinking that the world is 6,000 years old, [and] should no longer be capable of thinking evolution isn’t a fact…”

A general rule is that most people read books that have a viewpoint with which they already agree and I must admit that I’ve enjoyed Dawkins and Hitchens largely for that reason. I am already one of the “choir”.

I really do hope that his new book has the desired effect of making some people question their religious beliefs more critically but I’m essentially pessimistic about that. I suspect that the truth is this. Although “The Greatest Show on Earth”  is likely to achieve high sales, most will be reading it because they already agree with it. Few will approach it with open minds, including the atheists like myself.

See:
“Professor Richard Dawkins wants to convert Islamic world to evolution”
(The Times 22.08.09)

Filed under: Atheism, Evolution, Richard Dawkins, books, The Greatest Show on Earth

Why are prisoners who don’t even have the right to vote given so many privileges when it comes to faith?

Belief is its own reward

At the moment convicted British prisoners can’t vote  although a change in the law is under consideration for those whose sentence is less than four years. Why is a real and tangible process such as voting denied to them when something as frivolous as faith is permitted?

It seems that all religions, even the weirdest ones, are well respected in British prisons and prisoners of even minority faiths are furbished with all sorts of accessories and privileges so that they can “worship”.

Pagans can have a hood-less robe, a flexible twig for a wand, incense, jewellery and rune stones. They are also allowed to have Tarot cards as long as a “risk assessment” is made by the prison authorities and no prisoner uses their Tarot cards for fortune-telling with other prisoners. In addition to being allowed to have all this stuff, pagans can choose two holidays per year, from a list, when they are excused from work. This list of days includes Samhain, as Hallowe’en is know in paganism, the vernal equinox and the midsummer solstice.

According to figures published this month the population breakdown of faiths in British prisons is as follows:

26,000 Atheist
23,000 Anglican
14,000 Roman Catholic
9,795 Muslim
366 Pagan
340 Rastafarian
6 Nation of Islam

Ignoring the fact that Judaism seems to have been left out of the figures all together it is interesting to note that the majority of prisoners are atheists. Does this mean that there is a greater tendency towards criminality among atheists? I hope not.

I don’t know whether I am in favour of prisoners being given voting rights as it is not something I’ve really ever thought about enough to have formulated an opinion. I am very surprised however that our society affords even prisoners so much respect for their belief in the supernatural.

See:
“Privileges ease spell in prison for pagans”
(The Times 01.08.09)

Filed under: Atheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Paganism, Religion, Special Religious Dispensation, Prison, Voting Rights

Atheist morals. Are atheists “bad people” just because they are atheists?

Occasionally people ask me “But if you are an atheist then where do you get your sense of morals from?” and I am always amazed by this question.

One does not need religion to have a moral stance. Morals are a moveable feast anyway. On a Venn diagram of the moral codes of different religions any given one would rarely fit into exactly the same set of another. Real morals do not come from scriptures. The easiest moral for anyone to comprehend is “Do unto others as you would be done by”. In other words treat others as you would want to be treated. This is scripture, yes, but it is also fundamental and can cover pretty much any moral situation.

I don’t drop litter because I know that I appreciate a tidy, ordered and clean world. I find litter ugly and aesthetically displeasing. However, I don’t just take care not to drop litter in my own immediate surroundings. I drop no litter in places which I know I will never return to. Why? First because of a perceived mutual benefit. I simply figure that if I don’t mess up somebody else’s neighbourhood then someone from that neighbourhood will be less likely to leave rubbish in my own area should they ever be visiting it. Second, I have some respect for the natural environment and simply want to do my bit to keep the world a beautiful place.

Most of my other moral values come from this common sense approach and although I could call myself a cultural Christian, having been brought up in that faith, the morals that I use today are a mixture of those that I learned parrot-fashion in Sunday School and subsequent additions or subtractions derived from my own experience of the differences between living a good and productive life and living a bad and destructive one.

I think that certain morals are inherent. We all know that it is wrong to lie. We feel it when we tell an untruth. We know that it is wrong to kill. How can it be right to take life away from another when we know how precious our own lives are to us?

Much the same can be said of all the other “sins”. Greed, gluttony and sloth are obviously to be avoided. No one needs a bible to realise that. If one is greedy then someone else suffers by having too little. If one is a glutton then one is being partitive and concentrating too much on one aspect of life. Laziness or “sloth” leads to inaction and we all know that this world is action-powered; leaving the action up to others is a recipe for the world coming to a stand-still.

The Bible, Koran and Talmud all contain some pretty terrible stuff but even the religious amongst us manage to sift out the wheat from the chaff. What moral compass are they using to do that?

One of my most cherished values in life is balance and this has helped to guide all my actions yet I don’t remember ever being taught about balance from religion. Robert Anton Wilson said “Life is a balancing point between something and nothing and if one can stay balanced on that tightrope one can get something for nothing”. That impressed me and made me think long and hard about the importance of balance. No god taught me that; it was another man.

No one needs a bible or any other piece of ancient desert text to tell them what is right and wrong. The path to sanity is that path which our hearts and minds tell us to take. Surely nothing could be simpler than that.

Filed under: Atheism, Morals

More “birkini” madness – No longer optional but compulsory at some UK swimming pool sessions

I have just telephoned my local swimming pool in Hornsey and asked if a (fictitious) Muslim friend could use the pool wearing a “birkini”. They told me straight away that she would be welcome. I also said that I had no swimming trunks and asked if I could swim in my jeans shorts. The answer was “no”. They told me that I would have to have “proper” swimming trunks in order to enter the pool.

As if having special swimming times for women wasn’t already bad enough, according to a piece in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper:

“Across the UK municipal pools are holding swimming sessions specifically aimed at Muslims, in some case imposing strict dress codes.”
and that
“Under the rules, swimmers – including non-Muslims – are barred from entering the pool in normal swimming attire.”

Surely such measures are divisive and fly in the face of common sense and community cohesion. Is this is not bound to cause resentment from non-Muslims towards Muslims?

If I was to go to my local pool dressed in pirate garb on September 19th, which is a holy day for Pastafarians known as “Dress and Talk Like a Pirate Day”, do you think they would let me go for a swim? I wonder.

Having Muslim-only swimming sessions is yet another example of special dispensation for religions. This kind of policy divides people rather than bringing them together and because there are so many religions, taken to its logical conclusion, one that would exclude the majority most of the time.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Maybe the saying “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” applies here and the only way to show some local councils how truly stupid they are being is for all religions and minorities to demand that they have their own special swimming times. Wouldn’t it be great if atheists could get organised and demand atheist-only sessions so that they could swim in peace without being surrounded by weak-minded faith heads.

See:
“Swimmers are told to wear burkinis”
(Telegraph 15.08.09)

Filed under: Atheism, Islam, Neo-puritanism, News, Special Religious Dispensation, Stupidity, Birkini, Blackbird Leys Swimming Pool, Croydon Council, North Woodside Leisure Centre, Scunthorpe Leisure Centre, Swimming Pools, Thornton Heath Leisure Centre

Atheists are more organised than ever before but is atheism a religion?

Recently several people with whom I’ve been talking have claimed that Atheism is a religion and this is something that really irks me. Atheism most certainly is not a religion.

Religions share qualities that play no part in Atheism. What I suspect people are thinking of when they make this error is the organisational quality of modern atheism and the fact that atheists are increasingly joining various groups or “camps”.

The main characteristics of religion are:

• A belief in supernatural beings.
• Objects, places and even times viewed as “sacred”.
• Ritual acts focused on happenings, objects, places and times.
• Moral codes that have supernatural origins.
• Prayer and/or communication with supernatural beings.
• Social groups based on shared belief systems.

Atheism has none of these characteristics apart from perhaps the last one to a very small extent and only as a relatively recent development.

My parents were church goers and I got dragged along to Sunday School and Church in the 1970s. I hated it with a passion, mostly because I knew I had something better to do, like watch the end of “Thunderbirds” or “The Banana Splits”.

We were members of a High Anglican church but I never had the feeling that our church was any more than a social occasion for my mother to get dressed up and show off her newest hat. After church we would all get ten pence worth of sweeties at “Bobbies”, a nearby newsagent that opened on Sunday morning. We would meet other kids at Sunday School and play conkers or swap marbles with them.

Church attendance was certainly higher then than it is now but most church goers didn’t seem to be taking religion that seriously. It was a duty and the hour or so spent listening to a crusty old fool banging on about Sodom and Gomorrah was rewarded with some good nosh after the service and a pint or two at the local for the adults while the children played in pub gardens. It was all very pleasant and civilized.

Religion in the 1970s was dying. Anthony Trollope once said “The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor your religion” and never was this more so. As an elder of my teenage fold I firmly believed that by the time I was my father’s age, religion would have become virtually extinct. In my twenties nothing remarkable happened to change this view. Religion was a joke and almost everybody knew it. But then came the twenty-first century and all that changed in the blink of an eye.

In 1997 Britain had a new government and its leader, Tony Blair, was a Christian. Most thought he was a normal passive modern-day Christian. It took 19 angry young Muslims to change that perception and then we saw him for what he was; a crusading, sword-wielding self-righteous man.

9/11 changed everything in one fell swoop and we are still living with the consequences of that change today. Orwell’s nightmare vision of nineteen-eighty-four was real after all and Mr. Blair (of the Orwell variety) was just out by a decade or two. New Labour used the Magna Carta as toilet paper and introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Councils spied on people, CCTV became widespread and it was all done in the name of “security”.

Religion naturally reared its ugly head again and just as we thought it was all over the madness had a rerun to top all reruns. Fundamentalist religious types all started seeping out of the woodwork to add their tuppence worth to the “debate”. They used the new media to spread their message and suddenly it seemed like we were all surrounded by crazy lunatic fanatics. It was worse than that. Their views were being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Atheists until then were, for the most part, content smug people who thought “let these fools believe what they want, it can’t do much harm” but after 9/11 and then 7/7 nobody was thinking that any more. Religion was all very well when its main raison d’etre was showing of a new hat to the congregation on a Sunday but when planes were flown into buildings and 2974 innocent people were murdered live on the world’s television screens atheists, like the rest of the world, made a fundamental shift.

Richard Dawkins had written six books before the Twentieth Century ended, starting with “The Selfish Gene” published as far back as 1976. He made his mark and had a small following but not many knew of him until this century when he made several documentaries and then, in 2006 published, what is perhaps regarded as his most contentious work, “The God Delusion”. With this book he pulled no punches. Just the title was enough to make every vicar in the land drop his choirboy and choke on the Host at the Holy Communion.

Suddenly atheists were getting organised. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and many other atheist intellectuals enjoyed a following like never before. There were lectures at Berkeley, there was “The Brights” movement and in 2006, the same year that Dawkins published “The God Delusion”, Bobby Henderson published “The Gospel of The Flying Spaghetti Monster”. On the Net there were atheist chat-rooms, forums and websites.  Atheists were coming in from the cold.

Atheist groups are still a loose collection of small collectives but the concept as an organised movement is quickly gaining momentum. Last Thursday The Times newspaper reported on Britain’s first atheist summer camp for children set up by Edwin Kagin, a 68-year-old American lawyer who set up his “Camp Quest” organisation in 1996 after hearing of a Scout turned away from camp because he admitted to being an atheist.

I suspect that it will be some time before atheists have a world organisation of their own. For one thing, it is not in an atheist’s nature to be a joiner. Until very recently atheists saw no need to profess a belief. It was their lack of belief and therefore their lack of willingness or organise as atheists that defined them.

Today, surrounded with religious argument and in an increasingly politically correct society where there is so much intolerance towards any kind of religious criticism, many atheists are starting to realise that silence just isn’t enough. They are quite rightly asking “Have we been too tolerant of religion?” and “Is it time to start kicking religion up the arse?” Atheists are now crying out for a focal point, an organisation; dare I say it, a church around which to congregate. Books by atheist intellectuals and Flying Spaghetti Monsters are all very well but are they really the the glue that will help to create a sane future without gods?

Atheism is not a religion but if atheists are to evolve and win the battle for hearts and minds then maybe it is time it became one. Maybe atheists need to get more vocal, get more militant and above all, get more organised.

Filed under: Atheism, Religion, Camp Quest, Edwin Kagin, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, The Brights, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene