By assuming that ‘whatever god said is good’, “kill unbelievers” could be as good as or better than “never tell lies”. Or "don't let untouchables enter the temple" can be as good as "never cheat on your wife", just beacuse Mr. God said it. I don't believe in god, and I know few more like me. I know many who don’t know what their religion says or asks from them and simply call themselves of that religion cause they were born in that religion. And there are others who know what their religion is all about and follow stuff cause that’s how their gods and their religion wants it to be. But while looking at all these people and then at me, some things seem to be universal. We all seem to know what is right and wrong. So, is ethics and moral values a function of god and religion? Will people still love each other and be truthful without the fear of hell fire?
Religion of Nature, and Animal Sociology:
Ethics exist is animals without any clergy or religion. Its natural behavior of social animals that tells them what is right and what is wrong. Our brains have evolved like that. Laughter is contagious and so is sorrow. We feel happy in happy people, and sad among sad people. Only a few psychopaths will enjoy when others are sad, but that is not normal. So a normal person will try to keep people around him happy for his selfish interest. And then there is this selfless love that we imprint on our brains. A bold buffalo herd leader will face a pride of lions to protect his fellow buffalos. Similarly, a female tigress will kill anything in the way of her cubs. These heroic deeds and self-sacrificing love existed much before some fear-filled minds invented god. These are the ethics, the religion in our genes that guides us, the social animals. A bee hive works perfectly without a religion. A worker bee does not aspire to be a soldier bee and a soldier bee does not want to be a queen bee. Each bee seems to know exactly what it is supposed to do. No greed, no selfishness, no fights! The bee hive works perfectly well. It is in their genes.
But our lives are far more complicated than these animals. Our environments are changing faster than the time our genes require to form imprinted patterns. We need more than Darwin’s theory to absorb the changes and we need something that can program us before it percolates in our genes. Our religion and our culture is what does that for us. So we cannot completely do away with religion, but we can certainly do away with the concept of god. It is in our nature to seek love and beauty, to share and enjoy creating something together. We have ethics by nature and we don’t need god for that. Many of the complex moral values and doctrines we see today are a result of vain attempts to accommodate ancient human fundas to control and discipline masses. The fundas became our culture which got haunted by demons and deities to become a religion which further got corrupt to become the chaos that exist today!
The 'Evolution of Mankind':
The Stone Age man goes for hunting. They work in group as one individual cannot kill the deer. They share what they capture cause if you don’t share, you will loose your group. The males protect their females and young ones and the females return the favor! These are strategies to maximize the intensity and duration of enjoyment of your personal gains. Mutual co-operation increases our chances of success. Being foolishly selfish will only invite enemies and you will not really be able to enjoy what you have grabbed for a long time. Your partners will come after you for their share. So, it’s in your self-interest to be selfless at times.
A person who strategically acts with the understanding of the concept of 'selfishly selfless' is practicing “Enlightened Self-Interest”. The roots of “Justice” are in this concept of “Enlightened Self-Interest”. With justice, co-operational efficiency achieves it's maxima. All our lives we try to do things that will make people accept us and like us as partners in various activities, groups and organizations. While doing so they co-operate with us to act so that we like them and we are happy as a group and as a society. A husband and his wife are probably the best example to illustrate this :)
The 'Evolution of God':
If we did not have a culture, a religion, some of us would have spent first 40 years of our lives before inventing fire or a wheel and most would have died without ever seeing it. Forget about making cars and traveling in them. Culture helps to pass on this sum total of information so the next generation can move on with what was already know. We don’t have sit and write constitution, laws and do inventions and discoveries all over again. This is the single most important reason for the success of mankind. Unlike the bees, a human being is born with a significant part of his brain un-programmed. Then the people around him can program him and make him into a functional unit. A baby has no religion, no language and no information about how to survive in this world; it’s completely helpless when it is born. It learns whatever is taught to it and functions accordingly. It’s a blank CD that will play any song you write on it!
Just like this culture and knowledge transfer mechanism is effective in transferring important knowledge, science and technology; it also is used to transfer behavioral patterns, the religion. If someone has already found out that telling lies, killing each other, being foolishly selfish and refraining from duty are bad things, then it is good to document it and simply pass it on. It is important here to understand that bad here means bad for the existence of the society; there is nothing as right and wrong when it comes to culture and ethics. Someone might think one man should have only one wife and someone might think having multiple wives is the right thing to do. The root cause analysis of all our practices and ancient literature shows that they are written to allow society to function efficiently.
This culture and religion is a great way to adapt to the ever changing real and virtual environments. But we should realize when this very culture becomes a barrier in our progress. People get caught in believes that are harmful to the society. The commandments of Moses were challenged by Jesus and were changed. The first commandments are now believed to be disturbing. This means a religion needs to be amended just like the constitution of the country. Even in the Vedas there is a growing learning curve, each book getting better than the previous and then the Bhagwat Gita, the masterpiece of knowledge for the functional society. For some reason someone thought that people would understand all this better if it was told that, "there is a god, an omnipresent power that wants us to do this". Why don’t we keep it simple? We are a complex network, a web of life and each one depends on other. One unit’s failure can stop the cycle and so we cannot refrain from our duties. Why can't we look at it as a fact of science instead of a religion of gods? Why can’t we keep god away from all this?
“God” is the “Evil”:
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