Chicken, Meet Egg

I started this blog as a means of exploring, and explaining away, the claim that human morality necessarily derives from an external, supernatural source. That an interventionist creator deity gave us the rules by which we should live, rather than humans codifying rules born of our innate nature and sharpened by millennia of interaction and cultural evolution, and then writing creation myths and religious dogma around those human-sourced rules in order to feed other aspects of human nature.

The late, great Christopher Hitchens offered an example that supports the “human-sourced” conclusion: the parable of the Good Samaritan. Most of us know it, and you can read it here.

Hitchens points out the obvious. The Samaritan, having predated Christ’s sermons, was not a Christian. He was not taught by Christ. He did not learn the lesson of “Love thy neighbor” from the Nazarene.

Humans evolved to be social creatures, for the simple reason that groups are more apt to survive and thrive and reproduce than lone individuals in pre-civilization. Helping others produces positive emotional feelings, so we are naturally apt to do so without being told. Yes, we also have tribalistic tendencies, similarly born of evolution, that prompt us in the other direction when we encounter someone that is “other,” but the fact is that human cooperation and empathy long predate the purported arrival of the son of Yahweh in a certain Middle Eastern backwater.

Hitchens also points out that societies across history prohibited murder, theft, and perjury long before and apart from Moses’s descent from Mount Sinai.

There is a reason that the same basic laws exist across the spectrum of societies, geographically and time-wise. There is a reason that societies that were never exposed to the Bible came up with the same strictures as those that were. Those laws reflect basic human instincts and the morality that evolved from them.

We also have as proof that morality is evolutionary in nature the realization that present-day morality is better than that found in scripture. Women have been elevated from chattel status to equality in modern societies. Slavery, condoned or allowed or codified by scripture, and nowhere denounced as morally wrong in either the Old or New Testament, is today considered abhorrent by the large majority of humans. That apologists continue to writhe in efforts to explain away the lack of a commandment that says “Thou shalt not own another as property” speaks ill of them, not of unbelievers. Remember - the god that didn’t offer that instruction did have the time and bandwidth to prohibit the eating of pork and shellfish, the wearing of mixed fabrics, tattoos, trimming the edges of your beard, or sitting on a chair that was used by a menstruating woman.

Does anyone really believe that the Israelites would wantonly steal and murder and perjure and commit adultery and treat their parents poorly before they were given a set of “don’t do that” edicts? Or that human decency did not exist prior to an itinerant Jewish doomsday preacher telling us to treat each other well?

Repeating stuff that is already the case doesn’t grant exclusive ownership of that stuff, nor does it grant authorship. We have a word for that: plagiarism. There is much in the Bible that is plagiarized, including the creation narrative, the Flood myth, many Proverbs, and many tales. Even if you think “plagiarized” is too strong a word, the conclusion remains the same: scripture echoes human nature and history rather than being an externally sourced collection of directives and instructions.

Some are inclined to see scripture as useful, even absent evidence of a supernatural deity guiding its writing. Indeed, as a compendium of good ideas, it can be. However, it is also full of bad ideas, immoral directives, and “history” that is properly deemed monstrous by today’s standards. As I constantly point out, even the most devout, literal believers pick and choose which parts of scripture are to be obeyed and which are to be ignored.

Chicken, meet egg.