BEYOND EXPLAINING WHAT IS UNEXPLAINABLE, or what needn’t or shouldn’t be explained (for example, coincidences), the other important job of any religion is binding a group (tribe, community, and so on) together. This requires controlling in some way the behavior of the members of the group—at least to some large extent. A religion does this by laying down rules of conduct. In short, a religion supplies or backs the moral rules of a community, a group, a tribe, a nation. How religions do this, and whether or not it is right that they should do this, is the topic of this chapter.
MANY WILL ANSWER “NO” to the chapter’s title question. For example, many Christians equate their deity with love (see, for example, see 1 John 4:8, 16); one doesn’t wish one’s loved ones dead. In fact, members of all religions can sincerely answer “no” to the title question by following certain well-accepted interpretations of their sacred texts. But such interpretations compete with darker interpretations. For example, in John 15:6, Jesus is reported as saying, “If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.” Of course there are benign interpretations of this passage, and these are usually the accepted interpretations, but there are obvious threatening interpretations as well: “Worship Jesus or burn in Hell” is one such interpretation. There are less ambiguous passages in the Bible.
In Mark 16:15–16, we read: “And he [Jesus, after his resurrection] said unto them: ‘Go ye into the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.’” That’s pretty clear.
In Deuteronomy 13:12–18, we read:
If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. Gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. It is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt. None of those condemned things shall be found in your hands, so that the Lord will turn from his fierce anger; he will show you mercy, have compassion on you, and increase your numbers, as he promised on oath to your forefathers, because you obey the Lord your God, keeping all his commands that I am giving you today and doing what is right in his eyes.
This passage was originally written by and for the ancient Hebrews, but it is from the Christian Bible, so it seems reasonable to apply its message to all humans, for this is a popular and favored Christian way to interpret the whole of the Bible. As such, the passage is quite plain: worship some god other than God (aka Jehovah or Yahweh), and God’s followers will invade your town, kill you and your fellow citizens, and then burn your town to the ground, all by God’s command. Again, this passage is not ambiguous. Of course, it can be interpreted as having validity only in its historical context and hence no validity today. So, for example, a Christian could easily deny that this passage means that Christians today are to invade Tokyo and put all of its non-Christians to the sword.
The Qur’an, too, makes it clear that death and destruction are the just fate of all nonbelievers: “God is the enemy of the unbelievers” (Qur’an 2:89); “Those who disbelieve, never will their wealth or their children avail them against God at all [save them from God’s judgment]; it is they who are fuel for the fire” (Qur’an 3:10); there are dozens of passages like this in the Muslim holy book.
So, tolerance and diversity are not, at least on one reading, embraced by the central holy books of Christianity and Islam, the two largest religions on the planet. But now there is a problem. Both books are intended for all of humanity. There is little or no textual evidence that the Christian god and the Muslim one are the same deity (though in our age of at least a pretense of religious tolerance, it is often claimed that these deities are the same). And it is quite reasonable to believe that you cannot sincerely worship both of them. So, assuming the intolerant readings of both texts, no matter who you are and no matter what your religion is, you can conclude that some deity wants you dead. Two ways to avoid this horrible conclusion are adopting tolerant readings and believing that only your deity really exists.
This antidiversity aspect of the Bible and Qur’an is not simply a threatening attempt to enforce membership. There is a moral imperative to belonging to the group you belong to: “Our group is the right group, other groups are wrong.”1
However, there is no power, no authority, if a religion just governs group membership. A religion must also govern what membership in the group means. And this they all do, sometimes in great detail, and never as a mere suggestion. For example, religions tell us who we can be friends with, who we can marry, who we can have sexual relations with (and when, if at all), what we can eat (and when), what station in life we can aspire to, what role we should play in the group, what work we should do (and how), what crops to plant (and when), which outsiders are more or less acceptable and which are loathsome and fit only for extermination, how we should breathe and walk, and of course how we should conceive of our world. . . . Religions tell us how we should live our lives and what we should think. In short, they tell us not only how we should be human, but what it means to be human.
And again, in all religions, this is done with moral authority—it is a moral imperative to behave in the right way. It is wrong to be friends with members of a lower social caste, wrong to have sex with someone of your own gender (or wrong to have sex with someone not of your own gender before a certain age), wrong to eat the flesh of pigs or the flesh of other members of your group or of any insect other than grasshoppers, wrong to be a musician, wrong to lend money, wrong to just walk up to a dwelling and knock on the door, wrong not to plant maize, . . . and the list goes on and on . . . and on.
Where do religions get their moral authority? From their supernatural deities, of course. But, in the day-to-day cases, who actually sees to it that the group’s rules are obeyed, and sees to it that, when they are not, punishment is forthcoming? Are the relevant gods of each group’s religion involved in such punishments? Of course not. It is the people of the group who see to it that punishment is inflicted. This is very clear, for example, in the Bible and the Qur’an: the involvement of the deities in these two books in matters of judgment and punishment (or reward) comes only upon a person’s death. But not all groups or peoples have (or had) a holy book. And even those groups with one rely on elders and priests to interpret the book’s rules. Therefore, on a day-to-day basis, it is social tradition or the group’s law enforcement procedures implemented by elders and priests (or their emissaries) that supply the necessary authority so that the group’s members can punish those who fail to obey the group’s rules.
What happens if someone in a group fails to abide by that group’s religious rules—the rules constituting membership in the group? Often that person is the target of some sort of shaming—the offending member is informed in direct, public, and harsh terms that he or she has violated the rules. The person may lose certain rights or privileges. As the offenses get worse, the individual may face ostracism. Still worse offenses may result in banishment. The worst offenses bring the death penalty. All of these punishments are inflicted by the members of the group, not the deities.
This small but brute fact—that punishment for rule violation is brought by the members of the group (ordinary physical beings all) and not their deities—suggests an entirely different approach to understanding the role religion plays in morality. As we saw in chapter 5, evolutionary considerations suggest that religion is part of what it means to be human. As a species, we are religious because being so helped us win in the struggle to get our genes into the next generation. Perhaps morality is evolutionary, too. This would make a lot of sense because then both the inclination for moral behavior and the use of religion as an enforcement tool would work together in us—making us behave appropriately . . . making us behave as the group we belong to says we are supposed to behave.
Let us suppose, then, if just to explore the idea, that no religion gets its moral authority from any deity. Let us suppose that religions get their moral authority from exactly the same place religions get their very existence: the human mind and the nature of the world.
THE IDEA THAT MORALITY is a natural part of the human design is a very hot topic of research these days among anthropologists, biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists.2 By saying that morality is part of our design, I mean to say that morality is like language, like backbones, like enjoying music or food . . . like religion—it is written into our genes, and enhanced and molded by our culture. Moral feelings, moral sentiments, ideas of justice and fairness, right and wrong, good and bad, are a deep part of what it means to be human.
One might wonder how morality can be genetic, or part of the human design, if it varies so much from group to group, from culture to culture. But, as we have seen, both languages and religions look to be part of the human design and they both vary wildly from culture to culture. What is part of the human design is the strong sense that some behaviors are moral, are right, while other behaviors are not moral, are wrong. Which behaviors actually wind up in which class is determined by the particular details of the group in question. The same is true for which language the group speaks and which deities they worship and how they worship them. That said, there appear to be some universals in morality just like there are for languages. For example, every language distinguishes between nouns and verbs—one class of words for picking out objects and things, and another class for picking out actions and doings. Just so, every culture, and every religion, has rules against murder. What varies is the definition of murder (who is okay to kill and who should not be killed).
So, what evidence is there that morality is natural? For starters, the basics of morality are ubiquitous. Many kinds of animals—many different species, across many classes (birds, mammals, fish, and so on)—exhibit some understanding of what we call “decent behavior” (being reliable, trustworthy . . . colloquially stated: being a “stand-up guy,” or someone who would “stand up and be counted”). And these animals know when others of their kind are not behaving decently—for example, they know when others are cheating and respond negatively to such bad behavior. Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.
Some species of fish do what’s called “predator inspection.” The fish, while eating, notice that something dark looms up ahead of them. It might be a large predator fish or the legs of a fish-eating bird, or it might be some floating moss or a log. Swimming away from food every time something dark looms up ahead is a good way to starve to death, since it happens often. The fish have to stay and eat. This is clearly a situation where more information would be very helpful. The only way to get more information is to swim a bit closer to the looming dark thing and inspect it for the telltale signs of being a predator (which the fish apparently know). The fish’s strategy is: if it appears to be a predator, then quickly swim off; otherwise, keep eating. Of course, the risk to gathering this extra information is that the looming dark thing might in fact be a predator, in which case the fish just swam closer to it. To lessen the chance of any particular fish getting eaten, fish do predator inspection in pairs. (Getting eaten is bad in itself, of course, but also lost would be the precious information about the looming dark thing.) Both fish swim equally close to inspect the predator. But if one of the fish in the pair holds back and only swims part of the way needed, that fish is cheating. He or she is now marked as a cheater in the minds of all the other fish and the cheater is shunned. The “other fish” part is interesting. In laboratory experiments, if the cheater is merely observed cheating by other fish that are perfectly safe (because they are in another tank of water, separated from the predator and the at-risk fish by a clear Plexiglas divider), then the observing fish will still shun the cheater and will not swim or eat with her or him—even though the cheater didn’t cheat on them directly.3
Cheating is behaving immorally—it is using someone else (fish or human or whatever) to further your own ends. . . . As the philosophers say: it is not treating the other person (or fish) as a person (or fish), but merely as a tool. So some fish understand a certain kind of immoral behavior, and they know it’s immoral, or at least they know it is behavior they don’t like. . . . Impressive.
Of course, our primate cousins exhibit a much more robust kind of moral sensitivity to their fellows and their social situation that looks very similar to human morality. For example, primatologists have found that apes and monkeys will forgo food, even for days, to prevent another of their kind from receiving electrical shocks. (This is in a laboratory, experimental setting, and the shocks are only mildly painful; of course, it is far from clear that experiments of this sort are themselves moral.) Social rules that work for the good of all are also taught and enforced among chimpanzees. If primatologists feed a group of chimps who were raised in captivity and who live together every evening at a certain time, and if the scientists require all the chimps to be present before dinner can start (an efficiency measure that makes the researchers’ lives easier), and if (actually, when) some young chimps don’t come to dinner at the appropriate time (because they are busy playing or are being rebellious or both), then a few of the adult chimps go out and grab them, hit them a bit, and then drag the youths to dinner. The next day, the young chimps show up on time (for more, see Frans de Waal’s book Good Natured).
That chimps have morals should not be too surprising since we all share a common ancestor. About twenty-four million years ago, what would eventually be the human/ape line split off from what would eventually turn into the monkey line. Humans and apes (chimps are a kind of ape) split apart into separate lineages somewhere around five to seven million years ago. (These numbers are still being researched, of course, but there is a fair amount of agreement that they are close to correct.)
Why is moral behavior and sensitivity to immoral cheating ubiquitous? All the animals discussed above live in groups. Morality is first and foremost a set of rules for getting along with other members of one’s group. (As we will see, the more moral the rules become, or as the morality of the rules expands, the larger one’s group becomes.) The rules needn’t be complicated, nor do they need to be explicit. They can be hardwired or learned, or their general form can be hardwired while specific forms are learned. The key is that the rules establish what we humans would call respectful behavior toward others of the group. Actually respecting the others of the group would be best, but short of that, behaving respectfully will suffice.
All of our mammalian cousins understand morality in some sense: whales, elephants, lions, hyenas, and so on show behavior similar in varying degrees to the chimps’—they almost all understand that they should care for and respect others of their kind and group, and those that don’t show such care and respect are avoided. Many animals other than mammals also have at least a sense of fair play. So it looks as if our human moral sentiments and notions have analogues in other animals—a very wide variety of kinds of animals. If the rudiments of morality are ubiquitous, and if our primate cousins have a kind of primitive morality, it is not too big a leap to suppose that our ancestors—Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Australopithecus, and on further back—had a kind of morality. All of our ancestors over the last twenty-five million years appear to have lived in groups, and as just discussed, morality is first and foremost a collection of rules for successful group living. Hence, it begins to look plausible that morality evolved. If so, morality is a natural part of what it means to be human . . . just like religion.
We can now put the ideas of this chapter together with the ideas from chapter 5. Religions help glue groups together in two ways: they supply moral rules that foster cooperation, discourage cheating, and provide for conflict resolution, and they help make the members of the relevant group feel special by connecting them, and only them, to something larger, something beyond the ordinary: the group with its religious foundation. The power funding these two ways comes from the religion’s supernatural claims, as well as the religion’s notions of what’s sacred. Priests and elders (and other group leaders) rely on these claims when they exercise the authority the group has placed in their hands. Moreover, we know roughly what morality is: it is a set of rules or guidelines governing behavior with others in one’s group. The rules abstractly say, “Treat others of your kind this way.” All morality, of any culture, carries with it a sense that there is a right and wrong way to treat others, that there are good and bad behaviors and it is always best to choose the good behaviors. The italicized words constitute judgments of value (philosophers call these judgments “normative judgments” since they judge whether behaviors adhere to the norms set down by, for example, the community, or by reason and rationality, or by some deity). So, the claim then is that, because of the impact evolution had on our living in groups, humans naturally make value judgments. What’s interesting is that these judgments have a near-universal character to them. All cultures have rules against lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering. Of course, the details vary, and sometimes vary considerably. But the general rules are recognizable in any culture. So, morality is natural among humans.
But are the rules correct? Are the normative judgments actually true? In broad outline, yes. Many people think otherwise. They think moral judgments are matters of personal preference, and hence are ultimately arbitrary. Moral judgments are just like judgments as to which ice cream flavor is best. You like chocolate; I like vanilla. To each his own. However, the naturalness of morality—the fact that morality is deeply integrated with our being human—strongly indicates that this is wrong: the judgments are not arbitrary; moral judgments are not like preferences for chocolate ice cream. Try saying this: “Serial killers like murder; I don’t. It suits them, but it doesn’t suit me. Different folks, different strokes. I shouldn’t try to force my preference on them.” Sounds perverse, doesn’t it? That’s because it is wrong to murder someone. It is not just that most humans think it is wrong or agree that it is wrong . . . wanton murder is actually wrong. Compare: it is not just that we all agree that 2 + 2 = 4; 2 + 2 really is 4. Of course, we could have used different symbols to represent this truth, but the truth itself exists independently of us humans and our counting systems. Well, if certain acts really are wrong, what does this say about religion? We will return to this question. For now, we need to dig deeper into the nature of morality.
RECENT RESEARCH INTO THE PSYCHOLOGY of morality indicates that its psychological roots in us are emotional. We feel sympathy for those suffering, affection for kith and kin, and anger toward cheaters and others doing what we don’t like. Conscious moral deliberation on our moral feelings came later in our evolutionary history, and comes later in life to most of us: it is only as we mature that we use reasoning to bolster, fine-tune, temper, or even reverse the decisions of our moral emotions.4
But what, specifically, does morality consist in for us humans? What are our feelings pointed toward? As noted above, morality has to do with how we treat others. But this is too general. What specifically constitutes the realm of the moral? For many people, morality consists primarily of issues of harm and fairness (justice). I am in this class of people. Nothing other than these two seems like a moral issue to me. Other people see the matter differently. From his research, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that morality across the human species in fact comprises five different psychological foundations: intuitions against harming, intuitions supporting fairness, the desirability of loyalty, respect for authority, and bodily and spiritual purity (for short, I will refer to these as harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity).5 According to Haidt, though all groups of humans see harm and fairness as central to morality, different groups of people apparently add in the other three in varying degrees of importance. So, for example, some might think that homosexuality or drug use violates bodily purity and is therefore immoral. Others, thinking that fairness and harm (which means harm to others) constitute the whole of morality, regard homosexuality and drug use as strictly personal matters that are morally neutral (like heterosexual sex and eating raisins). But further, members of this latter group will see such purity issues as discrimination against homosexuals and as draconian drug laws and therefore as themselves immoral because they constitute harm and injustice to both homosexuals and drug users. Some regard allegiance to a country and a country’s leader, no matter how corrupt and evil (short of killing one’s own family, say), as a moral duty because loyalty is a moral duty. But others regard such loyalty as itself immoral since it is cooperation with a criminal, immoral regime. The regime, in harming people, is behaving immorally. It is no wonder then that moral debates around the world are so rancorous and produce so much enmity. It is not just that different people define harm differently (for example, some insist that killing unbelievers isn’t immoral harming), it’s that different people define morality differently. Purity is either a moral or a personal issue, depending on who you are. And since morality is all based on feelings and emotions, it is difficult to deploy rational arguments to sway those with whom we disagree.
It is therefore interesting to note here that often religions bolster Haidt’s latter three (loyalty, authority, and purity) at the expense of the first two. Of course, all religions have something to say about the importance of fairness and justice and of not harming fellow religionists. But these two are often secondary, placed in the service of the other three. For example, murdering homosexuals (which is certainly harming them) is textually required of all believers in the Christian Bible. Leviticus 20:13 says, “The man who has intercourse with a man in the same way as with a woman, they have both done a hateful thing together; they will be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” So, here, harming is second to (alleged) purity—enforcing purity within Christianity trumps concerns about harm.
It is not a big jump to see that some religions’ central purpose—especially in their fundamental or radical versions—is to promote loyalty, authority, and purity as a means of keeping the group together. We have seen in the last chapter that religion is in part a method of knitting groups together. Now we see the details. Loyalty to the group’s leader(s) and gods, respect for the group’s authority figures (which of course includes its gods), and bodily and spiritual purity, as defined by the group, are all alleged moral duties. And all work strongly to keep the group together. Harm and justice, on the other hand, do not function as group glue as well as the other three. Here’s why. The idea that we shouldn’t harm generalizes. It may take thousands of years, but eventually the idea that you shouldn’t harm members of your own group generalizes to the idea that you shouldn’t harm anyone. This generalizes to the idea that you shouldn’t harm anything—plant or animal or even rocks, as some Jainists hold. (I will return to this generalization in part 3.) The same is true of fairness and justice. By definition fairness (justice) has to generalize, to apply to all people. There’s no such thing as fairness just among the elite of a group; justice cannot apply to only a few—that’s not justice, it’s special treatment, the antithesis of justice. So while a group might have group rules against harming and group rules implementing justice, eventually the members of the group will understand that these two moral notions must apply universally to truly be moral. Hence, in a deep way, the morality of not harming and making sure justice and fairness prevail are group disintegrators. Harm and fairness require group members to look beyond their group, to consider the welfare of non-group members. The opposite is true of the other three. Loyalty, respect for authority, and purity do not generalize, they do not apply universally. They apply only within the group. Indeed, they are crucial to defining the group. Loyalty, authority, and purity are, therefore, group integrators.
We can conclude then that the sharp and rancorous (as well as deadly) debates on morals and religion worldwide are profoundly related. Those humans who regard morality as consisting in the five foundations—harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity—are also those who tend to support more fundamentalist, radical, right-wing versions of their religions.6 They are opposed, in many ways, by those who view morality as consisting only in the foundations of avoiding harm and guaranteeing fairness. People of this latter variety tend to belong to more liberal wings of their religions . . . or to no religions at all (again, see Haidt’s work).
Now finally, the problem is revealed: religion’s long reign as a binder of groups, as well as the morality that goes along with it, is under threat by a loose-knit group of humans who see morality as comprising only issues of harm and fairness . . . by a loose-knit group of humans who see the relevant group as all humanity, or even all life. If a group loses its religion, it loses its core binding morality, or at least the foundation for that morality. This is the morality that holds the group together—the duties to be pure, loyal, and respectful of the group’s authority. When that’s gone, then the group’s very existence is threatened. The cascade of losses can go the other way, too: if a group loses its core morality, then next its religion falls, then the group itself is threatened with doom. “If homosexuality is allowed, the United States is doomed,” a pastor once said to me.
So religion and morality—especially loyalty, purity, and respect for authority—go together throughout much of the world. And for this reason, the world is a very dangerous place. One can ask if such human-caused danger is itself immoral.
SAVOR THE IRONY HERE. Our deepest convictions that the universe is more than it appears, that it brims with the supernatural and mystical, that it is ruled by a transcendent being beyond the laws of physics and indeed beyond the laws of all science . . . these very convictions are themselves completely natural, completely determined by the laws of nature—evolution, to be precise. We see (or hear) walking trees because we are an African ape that evolved—specifically, we evolved big brains. We see walking trees for the exact same reasons we can stand upright, speak languages, and sing. We are a product of nature and its laws. That these laws have produced such a confused animal as we are shows only how utterly natural they—and we—are, for laws aren’t the sorts of things that can care . . . they just work—mechanically, remorselessly, and without joy.
But the situation here is worse than mere irony. With respect to religion and morality, and as we saw in chapter 4, we are in exactly the same state as an obese person who loves eating fried foods and donuts. Humans evolved taste buds and taste preferences that guarantee that we very much like fried fat and refined sugar. When we ingested all of our fats and sugars in the form of fresh meat and fruit, that was good, but in the age of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, we are eating only fats and sugars and in large quantities, and this is bad. Fried fats and refined sugars do not provide us with good nutrition. So, we have to retrain our taste buds to like other foods. We have to work to eat nutritiously in this modern age. The same with religion. It now appears to be bad for us, though at one time in our evolutionary history it was good for us—it helped humans survive by helping human groups survive. But the fact that we use religion to insult, harm, repress, maim, enslave, torture, and kill other people and other animals is vastly outweighing any good religion does. There are seven billion of us on the planet. We don’t need to worry about humans surviving the elements anymore; that we have clearly done. Instead, we need to worry about surviving our staggering success. It is true that we also use religion to inspire good and to provide solace in times of tragedy. But inspiring good is best handled directly, by a genuine appreciation of the lives of other beings, rather than by the carrot of Heaven and the stick of Hell (see chapter 7); and providing solace is better handled by trained social workers and clinical psychologists.
So, does God, or some god somewhere, want me dead? Does God want you dead? What is the answer to this troubling question, really? To wonder if God wants you dead or to say that God wants you dead is exactly to wonder if fat and sugar want you dead or to say that fat and sugar want you dead. It is you and I who want fat and sugar, and if we don’t control our desires, wired into us by evolution, then we will partake too much, and, besotted with these formerly hard-to-come-by nutrients, we will die. The very same thing is true of religion.