Carnival of the Godless and the Morality of Slime
The October 14th edition of Carnival of the Godless is up over at The Skeptical Alchemist.
The carnival has several good articles on the subject of morality. That’s one of my minor interests/pet peeves (depending on how you look at it). The theists have managed to sell their version of events to most people, which is that modern morality derives mostly from religion. Since they’ve managed to convince most people of that premise, that makes their secondary point easier to sell: That atheists have no morals and/or a society without religion would be immoral.
That’s absurd, of course. I maintain the opposite. Religion was developed by early societies as a way of enforcing the morality that they developed. Threatening transgressors with the wrath of an angry god, from whom they cannot hide, is an excellent method of enforcing moral conduct.
In other words, the theists are not going back far enough. While it is true that many societies codified religious morality into their legal systems, it is those religions in turn that codified earlier legal systems into their morality!
One aspect of morality is altruism. Altruism has been documented in numerous animal species, so there is clearly an evolutionary advantage. That means at least part of our morality is coded into our genes. God had nothing to do with it.
Dorid, over at The Radula, has an excellent article about primitive altruism in fundies and other species, specifically the slime mold. This article is my favorite of all the articles participating in this week’s carnival. After you’ve read that, then head on over to The Skeptical Alchemist to check out some of the others.
