True Morality: The Immorality of Religious Morality

The Immorality of Religious Morality

The god of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.  That is Richard Dawkins, who in his book wrote a list of possible additions to the commandments which have some rationalistic and genuinely humanist moral fibre: “respect the right of others to disagree with you”, “form independent opinions”, “do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice”, “strive to cause no harm”, treat others “with love, honesty, faithfulness, and respect”, “enjoy your own sex life”, “do not discriminate or oppress”, “do not indoctrinate your children”, and “value the future on a timescale longer than your own”.  I like them.  I do not agree with all of them fully, but I have that right as stated and would be happy for these to be founding principles to any life or state or whatever.  Because I told you so, the biblical justification is unsustainable for long, I would think-and I hope.  There is childishness to religious discourse of a sort unparalleled.  Religion is from a time in which guesswork was all that could be done, where the idea that a single god created the world was actually pretty impressive sensibility, far more likely than that multiple gods barely more powerful than humans (I am thinking of the ancient traditions of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Norse lands) collaborated in a haphazard fashion.  Then again, it was a time when the wheelbarrow was emergent technology!  If the bible had in it anything which could certainly not have been written in the Bronze Age I would have to stop and think, but it doesn’t!  God seems, overall, fictional and cruel, two things which normally coupled are harmless, no sane person fears Sauron’s All-Seeing Eye, but through the lens of faith the safe invention is transformed unto a tangible reality not of god but of his imagined will which steals happiness: it abuses children, issues pogroms, ruins and corrupts truth, and explodes sons and daughters, planes and towers.  I am an atheist because there is no god and never has been; I am an anti-theist because religion is powerful, and god is cruel.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil thing.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion”-Steven Weinburg.