Council for Secular Humanism

“Don’t secular humanists believe in the Golden Rule and in being good to people, and isn’t that in the Bible?”

or

“All morality comes from God, whether you believe in Him or not; He either instilled it directly in your head by supernatural means (it’s called your conscience) or you were handed down your moral standards from your good Christian ancestors—so you have to believe or you’re endorsing immorality, right?”

Of course secular humanists (and other freethinkers) are at least as likely to believe in the Golden Rule as the members of any religious group. Of course many atheists and secular humanists learned at least some of the moral principles they consider crucial from relatives or other teachers who happen to be religious. But neither fact has anything to do with the truth of religion or of the idea that morality springs from a god.

Any good anthropologist can provide you with a coherent, logical explanation of how specific moral principles have evolved in specific cultures. And any competent anthropologist will assure you that moral ideas are specific to cultures—that what is considered abhorrent in one culture may be admired in another. (See, for example, Marvin Harris’s Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going, Harper & Row, 1989, especially the chapters, “Why We Became Religious” and “The Evolution of the Spirit World,” pp. 397-407, and the chapters that follow those.)

The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or similar words, is not a Christian invention. Versions of it occur in the Old and New Testaments (see Matthew 7:12 for one version). But versions of it also occur in many other places, including in texts that predate the New Testament and that are not part of Judeo-Christian heritage. For example, Confucius is believed to have written, about 500 years before the start of the Common/Christian era, “Do to every man as thou would’st have him do to thee; and do not unto another what thou would’st not have done to thee” (George Seldes, The Great Quotations, The Citadel Press, 1983, p. 174). And, according to The Interpreter’s Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952, Volume 7, p. 329), The Golden Rule “is not a new rule. Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, and the Old Testament all taught it in positive or negative forms.”

There is really no good reason to believe that any moral standard is absolute or that any ethical principle is not a product of cultural evolution. The religious debaters who like to claim a God-given absolute moral foundation for morality cannot escape the fact that moral ideas change over time and from one group to another within the doctrines of any religion.

Christians in the Southern United States 150 years ago, including leading preachers, believed—with plenty of Biblical support for their ideas—that human slavery was not only acceptable but explicitly ordained by God. Few Christians today would attempt to defend the notion, though God does not seem to have issued any corrected Scriptures in the meantime. It is hard to believe that an omniscient God would not have foreseen how ambiguous his commandments are; believing that it is all up to us human beings to determine what is right, and to do it, is much easier to accept.

Conscience, the critical idea on which popular Christian apologist C. S. Lewis hung his own belief (in Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan Paperback edition, 1969; see especially Book I, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,” pp. 17-39), is much more reasonably understood as the product of cultural evolution, biology, and education. The Aztec who could, in good conscience, sacrifice a virgin to the gods and the early nineteenth century Christian Southerner who could, also in good conscience, justify owning his fellow human beings both demonstrate that consciences are not divine products.

Dan Barker wrote in Losing Faith in Faith (Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1998 [1992], p. 233) that those of us who lack religion can say to believers, “You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil—you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.”

As philosopher and founder of the Council for Secular Humanism Paul Kurtz has written, “Critical ethical inquiry enables us to transcend unquestioned customs, blind faith, or doctrinaire authority and to discover ethical values and principles. Humanists maintain that a higher state of moral development is reached when we go beyond unthinking habits to ethical wisdom: This includes an appreciation of the standards of excellence and an awareness of ethical principles and one’s moral responsibilities to others.” (“Secular Humanism and Eupraxophy,” in David Goicoechea, John Luik, and Tim Madigan, eds., The Question of Humanism, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991, p. 318.)

Finally, let me give you a contrast between moral ideas found in one religious text (the Christian Bible) and ideas I think most secular humanists or freethinkers would readily endorse. In each case, I’ll list an example of biblical morality, as actually found in the Bible (not as accepted by modern Christians) followed, in bold, by a more naturalistic, secular humanist morality:

1. Tolerate human slavery • Slavery is intolerable

2. Keep women subservient to men; treat some groups as superior to others • Equality of the sexes, races, etc.; stress individual human rights

3. Eternal torture is morally defensible • Torture is unacceptable

4. Killing people for religious differences, or for not honoring a religious day, is desirable, condoned by “God” • Religious beliefs are private, individualistic—none of society’s business—religious liberty for all

5. Accept, fear, and respect “Satan” • Believe in no supernatural power without good evidence or reasons

6. Anti-family • Pro-family

7. Sacrifice everything and everyone in this life for the possibilities of some future life • Live this life as if it is all any of us have, respecting the lives of others as if their lives are all they have

• Resist not evil • Resist evil as much as possible

All of the above is a long answer to a theistic questioner, but the questions are among the most pervasive and pernicious we secular humanists face. The association of morality and religion is based on ideas that preachers and theologians have spent centuries drumming into the heads of believers, and it will take a while to counteract.

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