Poop Shute

Calf -Worshiper: Hey look everybody! Moses is back! Hey buddy, what's going on?

Moses: Well, everybody, I have news. Some good, some bad.

Prostitute: Lay it on us, man.

Neighbor-Coveter: yeah, let's hear it.

(the crowd of rabble roar their agreement)

Moses: Okay, okay. So, I was talking to our all-knowing and all-powerful creator. He told me that when we die we don't really die. We get to live forever, we just leave our body here and move on to the next place.

(cheerful roar of approval)

Thief: That's great, Moses! So what's the bad news.

Moses: ...um. yeah. About that. I've got these new rules here on these tablets.

(long silence as crowd reads the tablets)

Moses: ...and... um... ahem. Here's the real kicker. You know that part of you that lives forever that I just told you about? Well, it suffers forever if you don't follow these rules, so... some of you are going to need some serious career counseling.


********************************

While in traffic yesterday and stopped at a red light my mind began to wander a little.

I was thinking of the many people who say silly things like "without religion we would have no morality."

I have already established on this blog that I believe that morals are a product of evolution, and without them humanity would not have survived to write The Bible in the first place. That text (among others such as the Torah, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, etc) are merely codified versions of what people (at the time) believed to be moral and just. I fully recognize that many of these texts also tell those cultures' stories of the creation of the universe and origin of man, but for the purposes of this essay, we're not going to focus on that.

Consider the fact that owning slaves or literally raping your conquered enemies or killing your cheating wife (if you were lucky enough to be born a man) were not only approved, but encouraged by The Bible. This makes sense when you consider that The Bible was produced by a patriarchical society that owned slaves and was constantly warring.

Also consider all the silly things that were considered immoral by The Bible, especially the first testament. Eating shellfish. Eating milk with meat. Working on a Friday evening. Homosexuality.

Yes, I said homosexuality. The Bible was written in a world where the next war or plague could be around every corner. Reproduction was of the utmost importance. Every soldier or worker that falls needs to be replaced to ensure the survival of society as a whole. Stigmatizing and outlawing homosexual behavior makes perfect sense to those people in that time and in that place. But not now. Not here.

Sorry, I'm getting off on a tangent here. While my mind was wandering in the car I thought about where I learned my personal morals from. I don't mean tracing backwards through time, I mean directly. That's an easy question to answer for me. Like most of us, I directly learned my ideas of what is and is not moral from my parents. They taught me right and wrong and the consequences of my actions.

...ah ha! That's it! Consequences. That thought is what brought me back around to the problem with the religious apologia that morals come from The Bible and religion. Remember this, I will come back to it.

Before moving forward, let's define a couple key terms here. A broad definition for immoral would be behavior that is in conflict with commonly held moral beliefs. To call someone immoral is to say that they violated, or are violating a standard that most of us recognize.

And the word amoral means something that is neither moral nor immoral. To call someone amoral means that they have no moral standards one way or the other. A society that is amoral is a society that has no commonly agreed upon values of right or wrong, and this is the kind of society that some people would have you believe we would be if it were not for The Bible.

A simple observation of the history of humanity itself is enough to tear that theory to shreds. Humanity predates the existence of The Bible on this planet by thousands of years, and yet here we are today, typing and reading on the internet. Keeping in mind that an anarchical society is an oxy moron, how did we get here? My point is, how did we even make it to the point when The Bible was written if we had no morals before then? If we had no sense that murdering and stealing from our neighbors was wrong, then why didn't we all just kill and rape each other? How did we manage to create tribal societies and civilization after civilization all without The Bible telling us what to do? Unless morals predated The Bible, there is no explanation.

The Bible, like every other religious text produced by every other culture on earth, is the culmination and codifying of the moral codes and values that were either held by those cultures, or imposed upon them by the authors of the texts.

And none of these books introduce anything that was new to their peoples really. I mean, we all pretty much knew that murdering was bad before Moses came down with the stone tablets. There were already criminal codes written and jails and executions etc. But what The Bible brought along with all these hardline rules was new and larger consequences on a much larger scale.

If you read the short scene at the top of the post, you see what I mean. Consequences. I am joking of course with my names for the crowd voices. Yes, I'm sure that prostitutes and thieves existed then, as they do now, but by and large most people then, as they do now, don't subscribe to the idea that stealing is an okay way to make a living. Keep in mind that anarchy on a societal level is impossible, and if none of those people had any collectively agreed upon moral values Moses would have found worse than calf worship on his return. The people would mostly be murdered and/or raped, the survivors would have scattered for fear of each other, and society would collapse into oblivion. That is assuming that all those amoral people could have gathered together in the first place.

When you were a kid and you misbehaved you would be spanked or yelled at or sent to bed without supper, or some other punishment. As an adult you graduate up to new levels of punishment. A grown up who misbehaves may pay a fine, go to jail, or even forfeit their life. Those are consequences. All religion did was paint a broader picture that graduated us all up to a new level of consequences.

I personally don't need that new level of consequence to lead a moral life. I enjoy helping people for the sake of helping people. I know not to steal because I wouldn't want to be stolen from. I don't rape or kill because the mere thoughts of those acts make me feel a little nautious. Those are things that I can't apologize for and I can't take back. They are brutally destructive and irrevocable. THAT is why I don't do those things. I don't need a book to tell me I will be punished after this life for doing wrong, there is punishment enough for me in this life to know better.