When people ask, “How can you have ethics without religion?” what they’re really asking is, “How can you have ethics without mythology?” Because religion is mythology.
So, how can you have ethics without mythology? Very easily. We’ve been doing it the entire history of our species, and everyone still does it today. Before Christianity was invented people didn’t spend their days wallowing in the mud having rampant cannibalistic orgies with their families. We were building cities, navigating the globe, curing diseases, and developing the sophisticated languages we would later write religious tomes with.
Humanity has been writing its own rules since day one. Look around you today. Your entire life is controlled by rules that nobody claims God was responsible for. There are rules for how to behave in a department store. There are rules in school, rules at work, Robert’s Rules of Order, rules for sports games, rules for war, rules for taxes, international law. Moses was an amateur. The IRS makes wrote 1000000000000000000000 commandments and counting, and those commandments have real, life and death consequences in this world.
Where do these rules come from? They came from the practical need to establish best practices to accomplish practical goals. 10,000 years ago we just needed to get firewood and food. So the practical needs of our lives were pretty simple. As society progressed life got more complicated, and we needed more practical rules to address the new practical problems standing between us and our personal goals.
We understand society’s rules and why they exist, and we still follow them even though we know we’d have to play Six-Degrees-to-God to give any deity credit for saying your car has to come to a full stop at a red light. We even have our own personal philosophies on which rules we have to acknowledge as valid and which ones are bullshit and we don’t have to follow. Every member of every religion uses their personal philosophical system to dismiss parts of the religion they profess to base their life on. Every Christian has their own personal ethics that guide which passages in the Bible they cherry pick and how they interpret scripture to conform to their existing biases.
The following experiment would prove my point: Take 100 people who claim to be religious. Have them carry a notebook with them everywhere they go for a week and have them write down every place they go and every person they talk to. Have them record a short explanation for why they decided to go and do each of the things they did that week. At the end of the week, you might have 2 or 3 actions among thousands that were directly motivated by Biblical doctrine. Yet you’ll notice they got through the week relatively okay and probably accomplished a lot of good things by following rules that were publicly and unapologetically invented by humans.
You’ll find these people even made up rules on their own, broke their own rules, broke other people’s rules and broke Christian rules without their week devolving into a cannibalistic orgy with their family. Why did they behave like such heretics, yet still manage to live a happy, kind, productive life? They used common sense to identify the most productive ways to maximize their goals according to their values.
We all do this every day, effortlessly. You put more thought into calculating your personal system of ethics than a supercomputer puts into calculating the world’s most complicated chess game. You might respond to this by pointing out that the world is in chaos and pain, but I believe that is due more to people holding onto irrational beliefs and customs than people using reason.
Bad rules stay on the books because ordinary people don’t believe they have the right to decide right from wrong for themselves, even though we’re all already doing it. When we take what we’re already doing to its inevitable conclusion, and all become unapologetic thinkers and problem solvers, then we’ll be able to agree on an upgraded social contract that effectively addresses society’s problems. But we can’t do that as long as we’re living in the past.
If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:
Agnosticism
- Why do people believe life is meaningless, and what do you do with your life if that’s true?
- How can the universe and life exist without God? What’s the purpose?
- Do agnostics fear death?
- Do agnostics ask, “Why is God is so cruel?”
- An agnostic take on God
- An agnostic take on Pascal’s Wager
- An agnostic take on intelligent design
- This Was Your Life: The Agnostic (Comic)
- An Old Man From Jersey Explains The Chicken And the Egg (Comic)
Atheism
- Predictions on the New Atheist movement
- Are you a meta Atheists or pop Atheists
- This Was Your Life: The Atheist (Comic)
Secular Living
- So you don’t believe in God. What do you do now
- Should science be legally recognized as a religion?
- The non-believers’ 7 deadly sins
- The non-believers’ 10 “commandments”
- 9 reasons to be kind outside of religion
- You already have ethics without religion
- My secular theory on ethics
- Karma ghosts (My secular theory on Karma)
- An Old Man From Jersey Explains The Difference Between Right and Wrong (Comic)
Islam
The Bible is mythology
- How I became a Christian and then lost my faith
- You need to consider the possibility your religion is mythology
- The mythology test
- A short summary of the Bible
- 10 scriptures that show the Bible is mythology
- 3 Signs the Bible is mythology
- 46 Questions Christians have to struggle with that non-believers can answer in 4 words
- 4 questions every Christian needs to answer about Exodus 21
- A more realistic take on the 10 commandments
- What I think about Satan
- This Was Your Life: The Satanist (Comic)
- This Was Your Life: The Jew (Comic)
- And Old Man From Jersey Explains Religion (Comic)
Christianity is Harmful to Society
- Why you should not respect religious beliefs
- 11 ways the Bible ruins society
- 10 ways the Bible will drive you insane
- 7 ways the Bible will make you an immoral person
- 12 things Christians have to worry about the nonbelievers don’t
- 10 benefits of Christianity you can achieve without believing in mythology
- 3 Reasons Christianity was largely responsible for The Holocaust
- It’s time to stop mutilating baby boys’ genitals
- It’s time to stop celebrating Easter
- It’s time to stop celebrating Christmas
- Never Forget Chick-Fil-A’s Inequality Appreciation Day
- The power of prayer
- The Island of Mana: A Story About Colonialization (Comic)
Preaching, witnessing and arguing with Christians
- 21 reasons it’s impossible to argue with Christians
- 15 mind control techniques both churches and cults use
- Christian billboards I wish Atheists would make
- 10 ways to be a better Christian witness on the internet
Christian Culture
- 10 signs you should stop pretending to be Christian
- Believing in Christianity is always absurd, but more so for certain ethnic groups
- American Christians, you don’t believe or practice what the Bible says about marriage
- Traditional Christian values are neither Christian or traditional
- Christians, you believe in science
- This Was Your Life: A Christian Woman (Comic)
- This Was Your Life: A Christian Man (Comic)
- This Was Your Life: The Puritan (Comic)
- This Was Your Life: Santa (Comic)
My Tweets About Religion
The Wise Sloth 
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