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.
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 big book of Jewish and Christian mythology—paints the vegetarian in a negative light: not only is his offering considered paltry by God, but he turns out to be a violent killer. Sheesh.
Granted, there’s a lot more to interpret from this ancient Levantine tale—for example, it is a cautionary parable about what happens between siblings if their parent favors one over the other (not good). But for our purposes here, we can readily see the explicit significance of the biblical God preferring meat over maize—a divine preference that extends into the New Testament, where, in Romans 14, Saint Paul refers to those who only eat vegetables as “weak.” Thus, Stacy’s colleague’s antipathy toward vegetarianism was on solid biblical footing: both the Old Testament God and God’s number-one New Testament saint don’t like vegetarianism. And so neither did she.
The point of this anecdote involving Stacy’s eschewal of pepperoni and her coworker’s sacred scorn is not to broach the debate over whether or not we ought to eat animals.2 Rather, it is about something bigger, deeper, and more perennial: the regularity and degree to which people think that God’s preferences are relevant in determining what is good or bad, wrong or right, moral or immoral. Or to put it more simply: the widespread notion that how we ethically ought to live is determined by God’s will and wishes.
What Does the Lord Require?
While my wife’s former colleague’s belief that God made the planet for us to exploit is certainly extreme, and not typical of most religious people—especially not the moderate and progressive ones—the fact remains that many social and political aspects of our world today are the way they are because lots of people think God wants them to be that way. Consider the scourge of anti-homosexuality. While fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and fundamentalist Jews don’t agree on much, they do agree that homosexuality is immoral, basing their position on what they find in their respective holy scriptures. For example, in the Old Testament, we read passages like Leviticus 20:13, in which God commands that homosexuals be executed. In the New Testament, homosexuals are derogatorily described as “shameful,” “ungodly,” “sinful,” and “immoral” (1 Timothy 1), and elsewhere they are condemned as depraved, wicked, and “deserving of death” (Romans 1). In Islam, homosexuality is also condemned by God—or in Muslim parlance, Allah. According to the Quran (7:80), which blatantly plagiarizes the Old Testament, there was a city of Lut where the men preferred having sex with other men instead of with women, and as a result, Allah destroyed them all and obliterated the city; Allah clearly hates homosexuality so much that he’ll exterminate entire cities as a result. And Allah’s hatred of homosexuals is reiterated in the Hadith—the canonical sayings and doings of the all-perfect Prophet, Muhammad. According to one well-known Hadith (Abu Dawud 4462), the Prophet Muhammad declared that if two men have sex with each other, they shall both be murdered.
Thus, according to the holy scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the latter two being the two largest religions in the world—God considers homosexuality an abomination deserving of death. And so, according to those who look to this God or Allah for moral guidance, we ought not allow homosexuals to have any rights. They shouldn’t be allowed to get married, raise kids, or love who they want to love. And in more extreme religious contexts, they shouldn’t even be allowed to live. Such has been the situation throughout the reign of Christianity and Islam: homosexuals have been stigmatized, brutalized, and murdered, and they have had their human and civil rights curtailed or denied. And such is still the case in many nations to this day. Why? Because that is what the Lord requires.
Beyond homosexuality—or meat eating—there exist so many additional patterns of human behavior, cultural norms, and laws in our world today because of people trying to live in a way that they think is required by their God. Consider, for example, beating, hitting, or spanking your kids. Is it OK? Is it moral? Well, according to the biblical God, not only is it OK, it is actually necessary; the Lord decrees that it is a moral imperative to physically harm your child. “If you spare the rod,” we read in Proverbs 13 of the Bible, “you spoil the child.” Proverbs 23 makes it even more explicit: “Do
