The Naked Truth about Atheists and Colligion

Is Religion a Boon to Mankind? Or, is it our doom? by Lloyd Harrison Whitling
The story told that mankind could not be moral without religion is more than wrong, it is a lie. Morality exists only as a social condition. Morality is determined by the factual nature of what inheres to the need for human beings not only to live together in communities, but to get along with each other, to treat each other justly and expect reciprocity in kind, and to find the most enjoyment and comfort as a result of socialization's benefits. Whatever would work against that must be deemed immoral. The table that follows depicts moral edicts gleaned from the propounded "immutable laws of God" recorded in the Xian scriptures that are supposedly inherent to the three most prominent Arabian religions. Preparation of the table required an assumption that what religious leaders express must have a scriptural source, or a source in apologia they have regarded to be true.
#	Scriptural Law or Precedent	Natural Law or Precedent
1	God created the universe in seven days	The universe attained its present state after billions of years of evolution
2	God made man first, and then created woman about 6000 years ago	Man and woman evolved from prehistoric ancestors millions of years ago
3	God imposed his will onto mankind by the giving of immutable laws of ethics and morality	Action and consequence determine moral behavior at an interactive personal level while justice determines ethical behavior at the social level
4	What God says is right and just, true and unchangeable forever.	Natural laws are derived from facts, as mankind learns to comprehend them and improve our understanding of them.
5	Mankind cannot be moral without gods and religions	Statistics have consistently shown the opposite to be true. Newer studies have only served to verify older studies.
6	Romans 6:22 (NAB): But now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit that you have leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life."	Slavery to God implies all through the Bible the right to own slaves and violates the democratic concept of equality and justice for all. Slavery is the denial of justice to the slaves; for a god to hold human beings as slaves bespeaks the denial of justice to its followers.
7	When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sin came into the world and, with it, came evil.	Knowledge enabled humankind to thrive and spread all over the globe, build shelters and adapt to the many climes, increase longevity through learning good health practices. That increasing knowledge has enabled us all to benefit from that, and more, becomes obvious with one visit to any impoverished nation suffering from illiteracy, or to any nation whose impoverishment results from religious edicts against self-improvement and education. Go there, and you will see that sin and evil must reign where ignorance prevails, even in the United States.
8	"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." Luke 19:27	The killing of one's enemies is forbidden under secular laws, and ordering them killed does not allow one to escape from guilt in a secular society.
9	"But which of you having a slave ploughing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, "Go and sit down to meat."? And will not rather say unto him, "Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, til I have eaten, and drunken, and afterwards thou shalt eat and drink?" Luke 17:7-8 That the Old testament, in fact, gives instructions on the care and treatment of slaves was used by southern plantation owners to justify the slavery practiced there.	While religious scriptures of all ilks condone slavery, no natural law has been discovered to elevate one strain of mankind over any others. To benefit directly from the unjust treatment of others goes against secular law in many areas, and is meant to be applied equally to all persons.
10	Hebrews 9:22 "And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission." This goes hand in hand with the required sacrifices of the Old Testament and the Xian story about how Jesus died to save mankind from their sins. Mankind is seen as sinful by no personal act of its own, but as somehow inherited in some mysterious and unexplained genetic fashion, not from Lilith (Adam's original playmate) but from Eve.	We each must hold our own selves responsible for the consequences of our own actions, and actions we initiate in others. No factual matter has ever shown that we are guilty of acts that occurred before our time, nor has a "sin gene" been discovered whereby we would inherit such guilt. We do, however, learn right and wrong through socializing processes and from the hedonic educational effects of pleasure and pain that we share with all other mammals.
11	And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them” (Deuteronomy 7:2).	The Old Testament is mainly a book full of depictions of gore, slavery, blood-spilling misadventures, and conquest in the name of the god, Yahweh. Human nature allows us to be manipulated into emotional hatred for people we perceive to be 'different' from our group, with whom our natural aim is to maintain some form of untainted cohesiveness. Facts show us that human beings are, in the long run, better off with some deviants in the mix, especially when that leads toward beneficial advancements. Look at the history of science and take note of how many precocious people were condemned, sometimes destroyed, for what eventually elevated our conditions in spite of that.

Just that few lines shows a vast difference between the religious and the natural (colligious) approach to defining "laws". What it makes most plain is that religious 'laws' require perverse actions and unnatural decisions that work against our better interests. In other words, the religious approach to morality and ethics leads to immorality in every area where disparity prevails, and upholds moral actions only wherever religions have adopted secular standards. What the table fails to make obvious is that colligion has been in practice for many decades, long before anybody offered a name for it, and has advanced right along with science. While colligion assembles mankind's growing abundance of facts into useful applications, religions seek to pervert that knowledge into their own advantage while, driven by a kind of evolutionary force, they seek to gain dominance over whatever domains they can by the development of technological force. We overlook how that same evolutionary "force" pits them against science as well as against each other, even though scientists behave as though they feel hesitant to enter the fray. As the unwitting initiators of colligion, scientists have developed and refined the system by which it works, and defined the materials with which it works. We can study that and, while doing so, advance our own understanding while gaining a perception about why so much discord prevails in our own ranks, and what can be done to lessen that. If we fall down at that task, evolution's history warns us that religion will attain the best 'fit' because it has never hesitated to modify circumstances to suit its own needs, nature and humanity be damned. So to speak. [ Return to Page One] [Next Page] [Previous Page]
Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved. "To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that." — L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —