Figuring It Out

Be kind!
Tell the truth!
Respect people's marriages!
Don't steal from each other!
Protect children!
Show care for old people!

Almost all religious groups say things like that.
Almost everybody says things like that, whether religious or not.

You don't have to climb up Mt. Sinai in a thunderstorm to know that we shouldn't kill each other, because a community of people like that cannot survive, or if it does that it will be a hateful place.  You don't have to go to Sunday School to discover that lying is a bad idea.  You momma can tell you that.  Experience will tell you that.

Religions don't invent honesty and respect and kindness to small animals.  Religions just affirm and teach those kinds of things.  Decent people everywhere, whether they are religious or not, teach those things.

Sometimes we speak as if we would be barbarians if people were not religious, but that isn't true.  A religion is just a certain set of mores and morals and ethical systems.  People in other places and times might have a somewhat different set of ethical ideas and practices than we do, but some things are almost the same, everywhere, because we are almost the same.

Religions are not the only way people codify their moral preferences and needs.  Many philosophies do the same.  Towns and states and countries do the same.  Being religious is incidental to a human desire to survive, and thrive, and fashion orderly, decent lives and institutions.

Religious people are often morally helpful, but sometimes they are destructive, as when they affirm racism, for instance, or when they discriminate against women, or mutilate them, or when they teach hatred toward people with a different religion.  And similarly, some secular people are kind and decent, and some aren't.  Being religious, or not religious, isn't the key difference.

It is more often true that a specific religion is just an easy way to describe what Semites believed, two or three thousand years ago, for example, or what people in medieval Europe or what people in Iran or India used to believe, and sometimes still do.  We do something similar when we write constitutions, and when we write laws:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . ."

It was not long ago, in human history, that we humans realized that the differences between us are not to be blamed on the gods we invented, but on the accidents of our separate histories, and our still-older common history.  The differences--or, at least, part of them--have to do with what is going on inside our heads, and whether we grew up alongside the sea, or in a desert, or in a land filled with rice paddies, or mountains.

We can figure it out.  We have to figure it out.