What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

be attained through God’s grace—oh, and the murder of his Son. Such is the message at the traditional heart of the most successful religion ever concocted.

      I don’t buy it. I do not believe that all children are born with an evil disposition, that sin is some hereditary toxin passed down from one generation to the next, and that the intransigent, default position of humanity is one of malevolence. Rather, like my fellow humanists, I remain convinced that while some humans sometimes do horrible things, most human beings are—most of the time—good. Sure, we are capable of all kinds of unspeakable barbarity, sadism, and savagery. But those are aberrant, atypical, and sporadic expressions of an otherwise—and obviously—overriding moral nature.

      Just consider the daily news. CNN. The New York Times. Fox News. Whatever news source you prefer. Now, to be sure, someone who doubts the innate goodness of human beings will invariably say something like: “How can you say that humans are good? Just look at the news! It is full of rape and murder! Every single day the news reports on the most horrific things. Clearly, one look at the newspaper must convince you that people are rotten.” It’s a potent argument. In fact, just to see it through, I’m going to look at the newspaper right now and see what humans are up to. According to my local city paper, a driver hit a bicyclist and then drove off without caring for the victim, who subsequently died; a man was shot in his apartment; a man attempted to kill his wife during a domestic dispute; two college students were stabbed near their fraternity; a mother and her two children were killed by a drunk driver; the owner of a hair-removal clinic was arrested for inappropriately touching female clients; burglaries at local storage unit facilities are on the rise—and so on. There’s a lot of badness going on out there, just this morning, as reported in the Los Angeles Times.²⁸

      But guess what? Daily news reports of various crimes actually affirm and support the humanistic insistence that humans are essentially good. It is, paradoxically, the fact that we read of horrific things in the news on a daily basis that bolsters an abiding faith in humanity. Indeed, there is no greater evidence for the veracity of humanism than the daily news. How so? Simple: it is because the news reports on what is rare, what is unusual, what is out of the ordinary. That’s why murder and rape are headlines: because they are notable exceptions to otherwise decent, everyday human behavior.

      If humanity were naturally, intrinsically evil—if people’s default position were bad, immoral, unethical—then the newspaper would look very different. It would be replete with shocking, unbelievable headlines such as: “Fifth Grade Class Visits Local Quilt Museum—All Survive!”; “Candy Store Not Robbed for Seventh Straight Year!”; “Couple Takes Morning Walk Every Day Around Their Neighborhood Without Incident!”; “Sorority Organizes a Picnic at Local Park—No One Maimed!”; “Hospital Staff Delivers a Baby!”—and so on.²⁹ But we don’t see such headlines, because they are the mundane, all-too-expected stuff of cooperative, communal, daily human life.

      As anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out, about 1.6 billion people get on airplanes every year, flying here and there.³⁰ They deal with long lines, delayed departures, cramped seats, and tiny bathrooms. And yet, on how many of these flights do people beat up or kill one another? Less than .001 percent. And while the news occasionally reports on a brawl that breaks out on an airplane, the fact that such a brawl makes the news, going viral online, only speaks to its true rarity; if humans were naturally inclined to be nasty and brutish, then the news and viral videos would be about flights that don’t experience brawls. The bottom line is that when it comes to air travel, people from all walks of life, from all races, ethnicities, and nationalities, people from all different religions and no religions at all, of varying ages and personality types—the vast majority—experience their flights with virtually no violence, aside from perhaps some mild elbow boxing with the stranger sitting next to them. That’s some strong evidence that most people can and do behave well, even within less than comfortable conditions. As American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, “our ability to work together, divide labor, help each other, and function as a team is so all-pervasive that we don’t even notice it.”³¹

      Admittedly, there have always been parts of the world wracked by war. There are neighborhoods right now where gunfire is heard on a nightly basis. There are people caught up in an international web of human trafficking. There are millions of people who lie, steal, cheat, rape, and murder. There are periodic genocides. No doubt: human life is perpetually pocked with misery and malfeasance. But for most people, most of the time, this is not the norm; everyday reality in most societies is characterized by people getting along, cooperating, taking care of one another, and living in peace. If this were not the case, our species would have killed itself off a long, long time ago. But we haven’t. Our underlying humaneness reigns, and it is never snuffed out, and it persistently prods the majority of us, most of the time, to do and be good.

      And that moral goodness has nothing to do with any god. In fact, morality can’t depend on God, for such a situation simply does not work—which is why a long line of skeptics, doubters, and secularists have been debunking and deconstructing religious morality based on belief in God ever since Greek philosopher Critias, back in the fifth century B.C.E., noted that the gods were purposely invented by rulers to keep people in line through fear.³²

      In the next few chapters, we’ll delve into the most basic, fundamental, and intractable problems with God-based religious morality—for it is only after unpacking and revealing the flagrant flaws and fallacies of this traditional religious approach to ethics that we can then move on to the underlying sources and promises of secular morality.

       2

       Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence

      God likes it when you eat at Burger King. Or McDonald’s. Or Wendy’s. It warms His Holy Heart. But don’t you dare be so impiously impertinent as to go to any of these places and order a salad. No way! You’ve got to eat the flesh of a dead animal, because that’s what God expects of you.

      Or so my wife’s former colleague claimed.

      Back in the 1990s, Stacy—who was then my girlfriend—was working in a corporate office building in Santa Monica. One day during their lunch break, another employee offered Stacy some pepperoni pizza. Stacy declined. When the woman asked why, Stacy said, “I’m a vegetarian.”

      This immediately irritated her coworker, who found Stacy’s disinterest in eating meat an affront—not just to her, but to something much bigger: God.

      “Don’t you know that God made this planet for us?” she explained. “He made pigs and chickens and cows for us—to eat!”

      According to this woman’s Evangelical worldview, Stacy’s vegetarianism was not simply rude but somewhat immoral, because it explicitly violated God’s cosmic plan: the Lord had created grass for us to lie on, trees to give us shade, water for us to drink and shower with, and many different animals for us to kill and feast upon. So why the hell was Stacy rejecting what God had made for her?

      While Stacy’s pepperoni-popping colleague was just one random individual, her love of dead animal flesh comingled with a devout theism is actually quite common in the United States. Conservative Evangelical Christians are much more likely to be meat eaters than nonreligious Americans,¹ and many of them see vegetarianism as downright unethical because of what they read in the Bible. Remember, for example, the story of Cain and Abel? They were Adam and Eve’s sons. Cain tended to crops, while Abel was a shepherd. Both gave offerings to the Lord. Cain’s offering consisted of grains and vegetables, but Abel’s consisted of dead animals—and God liked Abel’s blood-soaked offerings much better. Given that Abel and his meat were favored by the Lord, Cain felt humiliated and jealous, and he ended up killing Abel. Thus, the first murder in history—at least according to the