“How Does an Unbeliever Develop a Sense of Morality?"

I recently noticed that it's been quite a while since I posted to the blog, so here goes.

My Facebook friend, Howard Prouty, posted an article about a young woman in a dispute with her roommates who was caught spitting in and otherwise contaminating the food of those roommates. She is being prosecuted. Howard posited the legitimate question, “How does an unbeliever develop a sense of morality? That is my morning meditation.”

I responded:
Morality and ethics are rational constructs. For an individual in true isolation, they have no meaning or purpose. However, when a second individual is introduced, a "society" is created. In order for that society to flourish for any length of time, certain rules must be established. "Not killing" is a perfectly logical first step; without that admonition, your society quickly dwindles back to "the one" and inevitable extinction (unless "the one" learns an alternative means to procreate). Animals, even without our faculty of speech, create rules for their offspring. “Listen to me and do what you're told,” “Obey your elders,” "Don't shit where you eat," etc.

The books of religion were written by men to explain and justify their existence. They were used to articulate rational rules that would control and maintain their society. Unfortunately, in every case, the initial, rational rules become entwined in superstition, and fear of the supernatural quickly becomes the rationale for adhering to the rules. Once this transformation takes hold, then the most irrational and foolish distortions become "written in stone" through dogma and ritual.

Stripped of their superstitious trappings, rules like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," become perfectly reasonable precepts by which to live.

When Howard asked the question again, I replied:
Why would anyone make the assumption that this young woman was not steeped in religious training and religious history? If she's Catholic, she'll be forgiven with a quick mea culpa. If she's Muslim, she can claim they were infidels. If she's a fundamentalist Christian, she can do anything she wants and twist a scripture to justify her actions. If she's Jewish, she can claim that they were a threat to her existence. If she's Hindu, they were clearly lower caste. If she's Buddhist, she can claim that she thought they were Muslims. If she's a Quaker..., well, then, she has no excuse. If she'd been an atheist, she would have found better ways of coping through the application of intellectual analysis, invoking respect and problem solving to find a rational solution.

Another commenter joined the conversation:

“Tim... that is an excellent reply. But it WILL get worse. It's a new day. And any and all remnants of accountability for one's actions in life are evaporating. Mankind has historically gotten off on public torture and executions. Guillotines, hangings, the rack, slaves to lions... but just as we as a race supposedly had evolved... a nation born to be a world leader against tyranny and injustices or persecution... set forth in the belief of freedoms and under the banner "In God we trust"... we have regressed to basic primitive "Godless" acts. This has happened to so many now—in the form of our children. Technology begat advancement, and while no one's watching... they murder in the name of an obscure phenomenon called Slender Man.

It isn't that man won't stop using their religious beliefs to justify but that what little tether there was by acccountable morality has been lost. Those who were to set the example gave in and joined the party. With "progress" and advanced technology... we merely expanded the options.”

I answered these reasonable observations in this way:

I understand your pessimism, Kerry. I, on the other hand, call myself "the hopeful cynic." I do see a steady advancement, but as with most progress, it is "two steps forward, one step back." Many, if not most, of those gleefully inhumane forms of audience entertainment that you enumerate were either done in the name of religion or as a form of persecuting a particular religion. We actually have moved past most of those barbarities.

As you suggest, however, technology has certainly given us new means to destroy each other in the name of God and Country. From bigger and better guns and bombs to unmanned drone strikes, we continue the killing spree nearly unabated.

The surge of fundamentalism that has recently grasped Christianity, Islam, Judaism (the monotheistic religions) as well as Hinduism and Buddhism (polytheistic) seem to be a sort of last gasp in defiance of the steady march of true freedom: not the distorted "freedom to discriminate and legislate against others based on a particular religious bias," but the actual advancement of equality for women, the advancement of equal justice for all races, the advancement of rights for the LGBT community, the acceptance of the right of every human being to a safer, healthier environment.

The fundamentalist resurgence is a backlash against the transfer of power reflecting the obvious fact that those who who have stacked the deck aren't interested in having it reshuffled.

Do I believe that the impulse for human depravity will ever be fully eradicated? I haven't a clue. But I do believe that we have gone a long way toward containing it, and it was the development of ideals and principles designed to free governments and people from the domination of the irrational excesses and oppression of religion and aristocracy (also predicated on religion, i.e., "divine right") upon which our country was founded.

Remember, "In God We Trust" and "One nation UNDER GOD" were only added to the money and the pledge in the 50's, and they were added by some pretty rotten people to accomplish some pretty rotten things. The merging of religion with capitalism, using the pulpit to champion the triumph of the ruthless greed of the few and the oppression of the many came about in the 1880's; it was under attack from 1900-1920; it reemerged full throttle during the 20's, then submerged during the 30's and 40's; it again held sway in the '50's; it was lurking under the surface in the '60's; in the 70's it gained momentum; and since the 80's it has been the dominant world view of our preachers and our politicians. The irony is that people are turning their backs on these false and oppressive expressions of faith-based economies and religious fundamentalism. Hence, the drastic measures to cling to power.

Technology can be the bane or the salvation of mankind; it is not the technology but mankind who will decide. I believe that the human race really does have the potential to outgrow our petty and foolish adherence to demagoguery and chicanery, superstition and destructive tradition. I believe that we have the potential to not only learn to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us," but that we actually have the potential to choose to do so as well.

If we don't annihilate ourselves first (which we certainly might choose to do—a lot of people are making a lot of money facilitating that possibility), we can learn to adopt an approach to life that says, simply (though not easily accomplished), "Every day of my life, I will strive to be better for myself, for other people, and for the world." Repeat after me and teach it to your kids: "Every day of my life, I will strive to be better for myself, for other people, and for the world." It could have a much more profound impact than either the misguidedly altered Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag or the ubiquitous Lord's Prayer.

Satan, Santa and Stephen Crane

I saw this posted on a friend's FB page today. Normally, I would either "like" or ignore a graphic like this, but for some reason (perhaps the fact that I had just spent the previous hour responding to a comment on another post that I felt deserved a complete response) I felt moved to respond to this.

I get the sentiment, and I agree to a great extent, but I am afraid that it oversimplifies. Being an atheist is okay. Being a smug, arrogant, belligerent, self-righteous prig is not okay, whether you are religious or not.

Sadly, most religions shame themselves not merely with their intolerance of other faiths or points of view, but through practices that demean both the individual and "the other," including waging war against "infidels," "heretics," and "non-believers" in the name of God. Let us not exclude predatory priests, evangelical con artists, genital mutilation and female subjugation, to name but a few "religious" practices that deserve to be shamed, including defiance of science.

Furthermore, I know that it's meant to add levity, but reindeers don't have red, shiny noses, and perpetuating falsehoods and fantasies as anything other than literary fictions, no matter how telling and meaningful they are for the human condition can have dire consequences.

Insisting that the physical laws of nature can be ignored or circumvented has dangerous, real world consequences. Seizing a Holy Book—from whatever religion and regardless of how many times it has been translated and retranslated, collected and collated, reconfigured and re-collated, and no matter what wildly improbable or physically impossible events are claimed to have occurred (remember Leda and the Swan?)—and claiming that said Holy Book must be taken absolutely literally while failing to acknowledge any possible ambiguity or obvious contradictions can have devastating effects on an individual, a society, and our world.

I do not disdain religion nor those who see themselves as either religious or spiritual, and I admire many of the important tenets from many of the world's religions, but I decry those practices and practitioners who advocate the suppression or subjugation of people based on origin, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, or social status.

Stephen Crane wrote:

"And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the heads of the children, even unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me."

Well, then I hate thee, unrighteous picture;
Wicked image, I hate thee;
So, strike with thy vengeance
The heads of those little men
Who come blindly.
It will be a brave thing.

I concur with Crane's analysis. Most read this as a blasphemous attack on God, but it clearly is not. He is not offering a hatred of God; he is stating a hatred for that particularly "unrighteous picture" of God.

As if to explicate this idea, he later wrote:

I stood upon a highway,
And, behold, there came
Many strange peddlers.
To me each one made gestures,
Holding forth little images, saying,
"This is my pattern of God.
Now this is the God I prefer."
But I said, "Hence!
Leave me with mine own,
And take you yours away;
I can't buy of your patterns of God,
The little gods you may rightly prefer."

I believe the "peddlers" are the problem. "To each his own" seems to me to be a very virtuous statement when it comes to religious or spiritual beliefs.

PS: I liked the colors in the clouds, too.

God, The Pledge, the PC, and a Poem

The Pledge of the Politically Correct (written during the first Gulf War)

Angry Americans clamor

For Constitutional Changes

To Protect the National Symbol

From Despicable Desecrators

While patriotic Auto Antennas

Proudly display their

Tattered Flag Rags

Flapping fiercely in the wind

©1990 T. McMullen All Rights Reserved

On a “friend’s” Facebook page the following was posted in a graphic:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

…My generation grew up reciting this every morning in school with my hand over my heart. They no longer do that for fear of offending someone.

Let’s see how many Americans will repost and not worry about offending someone.” 

[I might add that the whole thing was in CAPS!]

The first comment, from Jonathan, said, “"Under God" was added in the '50s, during the apex of Cold War paranoia and McCarthyism. The original pledge was non-secular. This same hysterical time in our history is responsible for "In God We Trust" used as a slogan, thrown around federal buildings and our currency.

We evolve and shed the bullshit.

People who bitch about PC attitudes do not operate in anyone's best interest. They are haters, with entitlement issues about openly hating.

Recognize.

Jonathan, in a different comment, later asserted, “The Bible is a work of fiction.”

Then Brandon responded:

The Bible like all genuine works of world historical religion are works of the human heart not "fiction". Why do rabid atheist's eyeballs always seem like they are going to pop out? Hating religion, especially Christianity, is an easy, weak target for intellectual weaklings.

This exchange prompted the following from me:

Brandon, I am puzzled a bit by the distinction that you seem to be making between works of “fiction” and “works of the human heart.” Are you distinguishing between works of the heart as opposed to works of the “head,” i.e., purely rational, devoid of affective or emotional content? To be honest, I don’t think that I have ever encountered such a thing. Even the most “rational” piece of scientific writing has emotive qualities. It is the nature of written and spoken communication, and it seems unlikely that you are arguing that fiction is exclusively rational, neither inspired nor imbued with emotion; nor does it seem reasonable to assume that you think the sacred works are devoid of all rational thought. If they were, they would be worth very little indeed.

By works of the human heart, do you mean something that is “true” as opposed to fiction, which is “false”? I was faced innumerable times with eager students who, after reading some powerful and moving piece of fiction, would ask, “Is it true?” The need for it to be true in the historical sense gave them a sense of validation that a “made up story” could not. This error can be attributed to the folly and ignorance of youth. The most accurate answer is, of course, “though it may not have actually happened, it is certainly true.” Sadly, this consumer society has created a logical fallacy with their absurd and misleading phrase “based on a true story” or “based on real events” to describe the most preposterous works of supernatural or semi-historical fiction. This distortion of the concept of truth can also be seen in the absurdly ironic misnomer of “reality” TV for the ridiculously foolish and fabricated scenarios from Jerry Springer and Maury Povich to Big Brother and Fear Factor to Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

To argue that the great books of the world’s religions are “true,” in the sense of an accurate, historical documentation of actual physical events that occurred in a real time at a real place, and that they are “true” in their entirety, is also a patently absurd approach. Those fundamentalists who insist that every word of their “holy book” is not symbolic but literal either have no grasp of reality, or they have never actually read the books that they purport to believe.

Perhaps you are getting at the more meaningful distinction between pure literary fiction and mythological works. In this case, it is the motive more than the method that separates the two. Literary fiction is meant to entertain, to delight, to move, to motivate, to challenge, and to explain to the reader. The author may create a setting using verisimilitude or absolute fancy; they may create characters based on archetypes or stereotypes, or they may attempt a complex and nuanced depiction of actual people.

Notice, though, that each of these intentions and techniques can be applied not merely to great works of fiction, but they can also apply to The Upanishads, The Vedas, The Mahabharata and its excerpt The Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, The Jainist Agamas, The Tao Te Ching (or The Te Tao Ching), The Sutras, The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Koran, The Nordic Eddas, The Book of Mormon, and many other sacred texts. The difference between these “sacred works” and ordinary works of fiction is that the sacred books offer myths of cosmogony (creation), etiology (tracing of causes), legends and parables, as well as codes of conduct and rules of propriety.

While acknowledging this distinction between fiction and myth (and dismissing the more colloquial and ethnocentric meaning of “myth” as a falsity, fabrication, or false religion),

I fail to comprehend the source of your ire. You did not describe these works as messages from God but as works of the human heart, thus denying them any supernatural standing or sacrosanct authority.

If they are merely manmade, then they are fiction in their storytelling, howsoever wise in their advice and admonitions. As such, why can they not be held up to intellectual scrutiny, just like Hamlet, Tristam Shandy, The Scarlett Letter, The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, Death of a Salesman, The Tin Drum and other great works of fiction or Wealth of Nations, Gulliver’s Travels, “The Declaration of Independence,” Leaves of Grass, Origin of Species, Das Kapital, “Self Reliance,” “Civil Disobedience,” “The Pledge of Allegiance,” Mein Kampf and other works of poetry and persuasion?

You asked, “Why do rabid atheist's eyeballs always seem like they are going to pop out? Hating religion, especially Christianity, is an easy, weak target for intellectual weaklings." If something is “an easy, weak target for intellectual weaklings,” what must it be for those with some modicum of intellectual prowess?

No, it is not the ease with which individual inconsistencies, fallacies, fantasies, and absurdities in the religious texts can be identified and ridiculed that causes thoughtful, even spiritually-minded people to hold religion in such contempt. It is the use of religion by its adherents and by those ignorant poseurs who are deluded into believing themselves adherents, who use their understanding (or misunderstanding, distortion, or perversion) of “their” religion to justify their intrusion on the lives of others.

Persecution and subjugation on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and lifestyle; torture, murder and war from crusades to jihads, from occupations to intifadas, from suicide bombers to drone missile strikes (and no, these are not all morally equivalent—an uprising as a means of “shaking off” oppression, for example, is more justified than an invasion or an occupation) but the evil perpetrated from each of these acts of violence is done in the name and on behalf of religion.

When it comes to the original point, the document known as “The Pledge of Allegiance” or the “Flag Salute,” it is a very interesting affirmation, designed in the late 1800’s to bring a sense of patriotism at a time when the rise of capitalism had created slums and wage-slave factories. Bellamy proposed a document that would be recited by school children everywhere as a way of recognizing and encouraging the political and economic aspirations of the people. It said, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The flag was seen as a unifying symbol of the Republic, that is, the representative democracy, and not the corrupt and unscrupulous oligarchy that it was becoming. The term “indivisible” referred to the Civil War and the failure of the Confederacy to dismantle the Union, but it also referred to the economic disparity being created under laissez faire capitalism, the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, that was fomenting a disdain for and revolt from the jingoistic “patriotism” of the masters by the working poor. The concluding phrase is, obviously, the heart of the affirmation and the aspiration. It states that this is a democracy with “liberty and justice for all,” with emphasis on “ALL.” When read in this form, it clearly comports with Francis Bellamy’s socialist intent.

Bellamy was adamantly opposed to the change fomented in 1924 by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. They replaced “my Flag” with “the Flag of the United States” and a year later, they added,  “of America.” Bellamy’s protestations that these changes eroded the universality of his pledge went unheeded.

The crowning distortion, the change that, in fact, completely undermined the very premise of the pledge, was the anti-communist insertion of “under God,” at the urging of the Knights of Columbus during the Eisenhower administration. This absolutely upended an egalitarian statement about a country that protected the liberty of ALL and provided justice for All. The first statement in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights (the document without which the Constitution could not have been ratified and which is directly in line with the Preamble) is “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” By changing the Flag Code and declaring this to be “one Nation under God,” Eisenhower and Congress had thoroughly, intentionally, and unconstitutionally undermined and subverted the protection of religious liberty as proscribed in the first amendment.

Put simply, whenever politicians, pundits or partisans use God or religion as a rationale for promoting or punishing behavior, liberty and justice are curtailed, and harm transpires. Complaining about, even railing against those negative impacts, even from something as initially laudable as the “Pledge of Allegiance” seems completely justifiable.

The Burning Bush (A Song of Praise for Unrepentant Arrogance)

The Burning Bush
by Tim McMullen

Started 2003, revised 2007

I have seen the burning Bush
Reflecting the light of God
He blazed away in the light of day
But the words seemed rather odd

('Cuz he said) "If I suspect in days to come
That you might wish me ill,
From my fear alone God does condone
My authority to kill…
You and anyone who looks like you
And your children's children's children if I could
Unto the tenth generation of them that hate me!"
And the Bush saw it was good,
Then he put on his white hood….

"Why, they deserve elimination
They are an abomination…
Abombination here, Abombination there,
Ah (I) bomb a nation everywhere.
Here a nation, there a nation,
Everywhere I bomb a nation!"

I have heard the Burning Bush
Pronouncing impending doom
For birds and bees and the forests for the trees
The earth one blooming tomb.
And science? It's an affront to God
Whose glory runs on gasoline.
"My buddy, God, he gives the nod
To scourge the land and pick it clean

"For they deserve elimination
They are an abomination…
Abombination here, Abombination there
Global domination everywhere
With "shocks and awes" on Nature's flaws
We lie and deny the polar thaws!"
Such hypocrisy must give us pause…

Yea, I have seen the burning Bush
Rejecting the light of God
He blazed away in the light of day
But the words were disturbingly odd
Destroying "Thy staff and Thy rod"
With reasoning fatally flawed
New blasphemies yet untrod
Such effronteries to God
While patriot preachers applaud
The apocalypse here and abroad
The result of slack-jawed fraud


Yeah, I have seen the burning Bush

©2007 Tim McMullen
All Rights Reserved