The Atheist Blogger

Due to recent discussions on my blog post Answering “ed”, I’ve felt it necessary to clarify a few of the points I made when responding to the comments made by ed. A lot of the things I wrote were not explained well enough since I hadn’t had the time to sit down and think out my words properly. Before I do this though, I should add this simple “disclaimer”:

I am not, in any way (academically or otherwise) a sociologist and I have never studied sociology. I am however, a freethinker, and as such have formed by ideas on the origins of morality merely on what I have read, combined with my own reasoned thinking. As a freethinker, I invite anyone to criticize and even disprove my points, as long as you have decent enough evidence to suggest otherwise.

Now I’ve got that out the way, I’ll begin.

Christians love to claim that the Bible brought morality into the world, and that without God, we would all be treacherous murdering bastards (to use the term lightly). This is simply not the case, and if it were, we simply wouldn’t be here today. Can you imagine a world without morality? People would kill people simply for the fun of it, we would steal, insult, rape, and torture. Not just certain individuals…but everyone. The outcome? Extinction.

Yet supposedly this world already existed, and not too long ago either. In fact, if we go back about 2000 years, we should find ourselves in the middle of a civil war between every member of the human race. What we do find however, is a relatively peaceful society, prone to the occasional conflict, but on the whole quite sophisticated both socially and technologically. The Bible will not be seen for at least another 200 years or so (in its current format), and yet we see murderers being executed along with thieves. Some form of morality is in place here, so where does it come from?

Let’s rewind even further, 2 million years, and pay a visit to the first ancestors of modern humans that lived in what can be described as a “society”. These creatures lived in small groups, hunting for food for the entire group, so already there is a moral value present, namely the protection of those who are closest to you. If the women and children didn’t get fed by the male hunters they would die, and the men must have had some impulse to fend for the tribe they belonged to. This is a “moral” that can be observed in almost every species of animal, and it is largely a result of evolutionary instinct.

Instinct, rather “Instinctual Morality” is the most basic form of morality in my hypothetical theory of “Democratic Morality” which I described in the comments section of the “Answering ed” article. It provides us with the reasoning to know that killing someone is wrong, just as theft and rape is wrong. Of course it is evidently a weak moral force in our lives, since there are murderers, thieves, and rapists at large. Having said that, the vast majority of people would never commit such atrocities, even in a society which didn’t punish them. There is some evolutionary trait that tells us what it right and wrong.

One step up the morality tree and we reach what I called “Close Social Morality”, the morality formed within a close group of people, usually a family or group of friends. This morality is formed from social agreements that interact and sometimes overrule your “Instinctual Morality”. An example I originally gave was the concept of theft, which on an instinctual level we know to be wrong, since the concept of ownership can also be said to be instinctual. However, the trust formed in the bonds between family and friends allows small acts of petty theft, i.e. the stealing of another person’s food or other consumables. If you want a live example, then you can consider my flat, a grouping of 8 people living together with one kitchen. If I run out of milk, I simply use someone else’s. I don’t need to tell them since there is an unwritten agreement between our social group that allows for such an act to be committed. I know that at some point, another will “steal” milk from me, but this also goes along with the idea of “Close Social Morality”.

The third step up the hierarchy is “Expanded Social Morality”, which as you can probably guess, is simply a larger version of “Close Social Morality”. It is the kind of morality that affects the entire world, and individual nations, even progressing down to smaller communities. In essence it is the defining morality that we live by in society; a true democratic morality, determined by the majority vote. “Close Social Morality” has no place in a world run by “Expanded Social Morality” because it depends on a certain level of trust that just doesn’t appear in larger social groups.

It makes sense to say that “Expanded Social Morality” has been the defining factor in the development of society, and can be seen in most modern societies. Most if not all religions simply latched onto the morals that were present in society at the time, and re-branded them as specific rules to live by. Morality didn’t come from the Bible, the Bible came from morality. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the so called “morals” in the Bible that condone slavery and rape are not morals that should be present in our modern society. Of course, they were not morally wrong in the context of the time, but we have outgrown them as a species, and in doing so have become better for it.

Of course, this is only my educated and rationalized hypothesis on how morality works. Nothing would make me happier than for someone with a degree in sociology to come and either support of disprove all my points! Of course, naturally if anyone has any objections to my article, I will most happily debate them in the comments.

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