Religious Morality

It's psychologically comforting to believe in supernatural father figure who chooses us, guides us and rewards us, provided we perform stone age rituals and follow archaic rules primarily applicable to medieval peoples. The reasons people believe in supernaturals are many and have varied historically. However, from an evolutionary perspective it's entirely probable that our ancestors, through natural selection by the genes that shaped our brains, may have made us psychologically predispositioned to gravitate toward obedience to authoritative figure(s). Children obey adults who believe in things who then obey persuasive cultural leaders. That is not to suggest that believing in supernaturals arises from human instinct or that humans are behaving accordingly by believing in Gods, it only provides a hypothetical evolutionary perspective, a perspective religions completely deny. This makes the subject more interesting, particularly the religious' confrontational stance against the inter-connected biological composition of living things which disproves creation.

Evolution is validated act no fact refutes. Evolutionary data clarifies the human's natural moral proclivity. Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives, it's about how things are and how/why they work the way they do. Science welcomes evaluation unlike religion which is infallible and not subject to detachment, objectivity, and quantifiability. It explained many falsehoods including religious fallacies. Yet religions seek potholes in scientific discoveries in an attempt to fill the void of incomprehensible magical dictates, looking for "God of the gaps"; a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. This absurdity often belittles the concept of God to a mere "we don't know what caused that so we assume it was God" — equally untenable talking points further diminish God to a shrinking turf of scientific ignorance.

The religious often invoke moral imperatives for believing mythical supernaturals (when all other plausibles fail miserably). This blatantly disingenuous argument ignores evolutionary data that demonstrates the innate underpinnings of morality by rendering it a learned trade. Religious morality basically comes from bronze age rules that spread by word of mouth by primitive men in a given geographical area, and although touted as virtuous they include human sacrifices, slavery, be-headings, war and oppression. A religious person even in modern times would gleefully boast that he/she would murder their neighbor had it not been for their, say, believe in Jesus. This morality is promoted as "holy", and provokes polemic invective against any opposing rational thought. Even animals have shown morality that supersedes that of many Gods!

Of the millions of Gods humans have worshiped throughout history, each shares striking similarities with the geographical population, despite being uber-galactic. Everything from emotional reasoning level to the names of Gods to local intellectual and cultural standards, from human fondness of reward and punishment — from the virgins to be met in heaven to the hell fire that awaits sinners — and the exploitation of our desire to be “praiseworthy.” Humans are so sensitive to public opinion that we only need to see a picture of two eyes glued to the wall to respond with good behavior, which explains the image in some religions of an all-seeing eye to symbolize an omniscient God. Non anthropomorphic Gods presumably possessing non human characteristics, whose physical structures go beyond our feeble minds' comprehension, hilariously have eyes that see us all, ears that hears us all and essentially all human senses! Which begs the question; did God create man or did man create God? An Arabic God like Allah would behave exactly like Arabs and reward or punish accordingly. An Asian God would display Asian characteristics. It's highly improbable the vise versa could occur. Who'd expect a God bearing African traits to appear in another continent? Clearly there is nothing perplexing about religion in comparison to science's unparalleled quest for truth.

More often than not undesirable behavior is blamed on biological outcomes ("we're behaving like animals!"), while claiming our noble traits for ourselves, when both are product of evolution. Fortunately, there has been a resurgence of the Darwinian view that morality grew out of the social instincts. Psychologists stress the intuitive way we arrive at moral judgments while activating emotional brain areas, and economists and anthropologists have shown humanity to be far more cooperative, altruistic, and fair than predicted by self-interest models. Religions seduce unsuspecting and unassuming children with morality, moral enticements involving believe in a particular God; if you don't believe you are immoral and condemned to fictional hell. In this regard one is moral, not because it is hereditary or noble, but because it's a proposition of vengeance and reward and punishment. Additionally, the very definition of morality is blurred in favor of enduring mythological ideological commitments.

Charles Darwin was interested in how morality fits the human-animal continuum, proposing in “The Descent of Man”: “Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts…would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed … as in man.” While this opens up the potential for more strenuous scientific investigation, religion teaches its followers to be content with not knowing and deems learning and discovering sinful practices. Religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — are trained to deceive by selling ignorance as "holy." Shouldn't the truth be noble and holy? People defend believe in supernaturals with "confirmation bias", they don't truly understand why they defend these silly fairy tales but they just know that they have to, often subconsciously, and, to convince themselves as well.

Since its conception a few thousand years ago religion continuously undermined scientific discoveries. And while still limited in scope scientific knowledge has unleashed astonishing discoveries about humans and living things in general, such as the human DNA sequencing, indicating that human genome and animal genome sequencing share extraordinary similarities; humans are 98% chimps, 92% mouse, 80% cows and 50% plants. The entire Earthly ecosystem is not only inter-connected but inter-dependent. However, some areas thought solved turn out to be the other way around because knowledge is gained. This is common to every subject in life. If you know a lot about something, you know how less you know. This flies in the face of the Bible or the Quraan which enforce unquestionable fairy tales through indoctrination. These outdated scriptures would not and could not have known that humans consist of cells originating from bacteria. Moreover, religions postulate the world is six thousand years old when there are structures that are more than ten thousand years old scattered around the world, and that humans are made from clay and mud when evidence obliterates such preposterous and asinine nonsense. This relegated religion to third world societies because it's not easy to promulgate to advanced societies stone age texts written by sheep herders to explain how the universe works.

Religious morality argues for medieval good versus evil conceptualization, from the least credible sources and the least credible people through an unprecedented criteria for gullibility, as legitimate authority. It is antiquated and dwarfed by modern, secular progressive values. Its use of fear as key element to advance its atrocious warfare is tantamount to child abuse and mental illness and criminality. Morality cannot be provided by Harry Potter type stories of magic and invisible supernatural beings in the sky. Faith provides nothing factual and is interchangeable. The religion a person worships today is entirely coincidental which begins with labeling of children. If we were born in ancient Greece we'd be worshiping Zeus, if we were born in Denmark during the Vikings era we would be worshiping Thor, Waaq in pre-Islamic Somalia, so on and so forth. And it always just so happens to be the right religion that our family chose. It's laughable that a creator of the universe would only know about the area in which said religion emanates from while trying to rationalize a plethora of ridiculous superstitions. Religion's principally ungraspable and refuted tales, such as the sun moving across the sky rather than the Earth spinning, implicate its lack of depth beyond mere observation.