Objective Moral Truth

We might wonder at the ultimate origin of all of existence but we can know our own for a certainty: we are born as infants, the children of humanity. At some point we become conscious individuals aware of our own and each others existence.

We find ourselves born together, entrusted to each other. We can pick up our arms and fight, or we can learn to get along. The question that we face is this:

Given the choice between life and death, which do we value the most?

Without regard to the origin of the universe, this question remains. The answer to this question becomes the objective basis for all moral rules that might follow.

If we choose to fight there will be one left standing, mortally wounded, soon to die. If death is our highest value, then we should fight. Otherwise, we should choose life. We then create rules by which we will live in peace with one another. We take our oaths and then we make the decision to trust each other.

Observing that we are born with no choice but to trust our caretakers to see to our welfare, and that without trusting each other we are doomed to fight and die, trust is exposed as the primary objective moral concept.

The ancient philosopher who wrote the book of Genesis observed this same truth. In the story of Cain and able, the fundamental question arose in its infant form: "Am I my brothers keeper?"

Therefore, we value life and further, we recognize that we must have equality among each other. We must all be free to pursue our own happiness while maintaining our oath of trust to protect the lives of each other. Therefore we create rules of freedom and such rules rightfully include restraint of individuals who have failed to uphold their oaths. We can get out of the punishment business and into the healing business. We can provide the opportunity for the restrained to work while restrained to make restitution and to earn our trust once again. For one who has killed, restitution seems to be impossible but the work to earn our trust should remain the goal, without regard to the number of years it might take even if ones entire life.

We protect each other. We are each others keepers. This is true in any universe where life evolves, and it is true in any universe where life is created. We have the power to live or die and to cause each other to live or die and we have the choice to make.

We have never needed a sacred book to see this simple moral truth. We have never needed a single word of any God that might exist. If such God exists, perhaps that is why God is silent. Any single word or phrase would be subject to fighting over its interpretation. This is born out in the atrocities committed by man over the centuries because of violent interpretation of words purported to be those of God.

In a created universe, the creation itself gives us the knowledge we need to create a world of peace. This is no different than a universe that is not created.

If one wishes to believe in God then it does seem pointless to believe in a God that is not wise. And as we can clearly see, a wise God would remain carefully silent, and if God exists, this is the God we see.

We can now begin to evolve together and create a world of peace. Created or evolved, atheist or theist, we all see the same objective moral truth.

The Evolution of a World of Peace

In the past, natural selection favored the evolution of neural structures conducive to unquestioning belief. With the advent of free societies and flourishing education, such structures were no longer needed and began to vanish. However, in some pockets in the world, artificial selection of these same structures is resulting in a steady degeneration of thinking capacities and regression towards violence and restriction of the human rights of women and children.

As we evolved into conscious beings, we gained a predilection to simply believe what we were told. The shouted imperative, “…the storm is approaching!” served as well as “…the God of thunder is approaching!” in herding the children towards shelters. Those that did not believe became the victims of the calamities. The truth of the content of the warning did not matter as much as simply heeding the warning.

As the opposing armies of ancient tribes steeled themselves for impending battles, they were each abetted by a belief in a powerful god who was on their side, who would protect them during the conflict. The greater the force of this mindless belief, the more courageous the man in battle. Natural selection stepped in to weed out the skeptics.

Every battle has a victor and the winners were naturally inclined to give thanks to their mythical gods. Theories of the personalities of the gods were formed. These were passed down in stories and finally in written form. These early writings were precious indeed, not because of their content, but because they were so difficult to reproduce. They were the only writings around. The psychology of man was severely impacted by this dichotomy of value assessment over scriptures. The documents were scarce and thus sacred and this resulted in an equivalent valuation of the content. The scriptures began to be proclaimed as very words of the gods of wars. The contents of the warnings began to matter more than the reason for the warnings.

Today these same scriptures are handed to children all over the world accompanied by corporal threats that they must be never questioned. In some cultures, those children that grow to question the writings are cut off with violence. Artificial selection is at work here, culling the superior skeptical brain structures from the gene pool in favor of those structures conducive to mindless belief. The degenerative effect is plain to see in the violence of the persisting tribal wars and gross corporal punishments against the women and children. The belief that there exists a god that must be honored with violence against those who disbelieve is ensconced in the brains of the men, sewed up in a palpable fear response against any doubt.

Being hard-wired for mindless belief does not doom a man. The cure is patently simple: Read books of science. Study the accumulated knowledge of man. In short, become educated. It does not matter how long it takes, just keep reading. Mindless belief no longer serves to enhance our survival. As our children become educated they will test our beliefs and improve them. It is our job to make sure their minds are free from the prejudice with which we were inflicted by our religious parents. Natural selection will take over and their brains will improve.

The natural evolution of a human life is to learn. We are happiest when our minds are active, when we are learning new ideas and combining old ideas into novelties. In the free world, we have libraries, bookstores and the internet by which we can continue our lifelong educations. As we build a world of peace we will be making all of this knowledge available for everyone. We will document and enact human rights for all men, women, and children to access to the accumulated knowledge of man. To what greater or nobler effort can a free man attend than to bring these instruments of knowledge to the people of the world who today are denied?

The Bible and Qur’an: The Trap, the Illness and the Cure

The written word can trap the mind of man. It is in our nature to grant some respect to what has been written. Some of us go so far as to grant ultimate and unequivocal respect to a writing that is held to be infallible. Once that happens a trap is set. If the writings themselves contain a circle of reasoning that threaten punishment for doubt as to truth of the writing, the trap snaps shut. A physical connection in the brain is forged, obscuring paths of logic with releases of fear inducing chemicals.

Many years ago, after we had evolved to our awareness of our own existence, we had begun to see each other as individual agents, operating according to our own internal plans. We saw this same pattern of agency in the great beasts of the field. We heard their distant roars in the evenings and we found them hidden in the grass, stalking and planning a time to strike. We saw the sudden springing, the vicious blows with claws and teeth and the execution of the kill.

We heard the distant thunder in the skies and learned that it could portend the same sudden strike and execution. As the thunder grew in power we huddled together and waited, assigning agency to the whims of the storms. This was a logical conclusion for our primitive logical minds. The storm was angry, like the great cats. Quivering against the torrents and lightning we breathed silent wishes as supplications, to beg the storm to move on and spare our children. When calm had returned we surveyed the windblown damage and counted who remained. We logically concluded that the angry storm had acceded to our requests and a concept of prayer had entered the mind of man.

From these simple beginnings, when we were just evolved and unaware of the science of nature, we elaborated stories of the great and powerful agent behind the volcanoes, storms, and earthquakes. We had little choice but to do so. We thought our only chance was to behave according to the wishes of the agents. And so we created stories of one or many Gods who demonstrated anger and discontent with the behavior of man. We learned that these stories can serve as a basis for moral rules and that if the community obeyed then relative peace could be observed.

As we evolved the written word these stories were set down and shared. The writings became sacred. The trap firmly closed around the inquisitive mind of man. The trap has always been with us, we are well and truly trapped, ruled by fear, ruled by the physical construction of a false idea in our brains. We are physically ill. The words of the writing command that everyone believe and worship. It is almost as if the false idea has taken on a life of its own, fighting as viscously as the lion for its survival. Men feel forced to honor the angry agent by killing others who dishonor its name. The false idea replicates, just like any living thing. It replicates throughout the generations of man. We have inherited the same false idea.

There is a cure. The false idea was sprung from our ignorance, the medicine is learning, the patient study and accumulation of knowledge.

There is no angry God, commanding belief and worship, intently watching with perfect eyes the eternal burning of anguished people in hell. Such a beast has never existed. It was borne of our ignorance and fear.

There is no God at all. We have this universe, we have each other. There might be life elsewhere and someday we can find it if we all survive.

Some of us wish for God to exist because we awaken in a world with children who need love. We are born and grow older and find each other looking for relationships of trust and love. And upon embarking on a journey of love we can hardly help but to whisper an occasionally prayer, that if there be any power that can lend some help that such help be given to the one who is beloved.

Indeed, if God exists at all, then all of us can see the decisions of God. And the decisions of God indicate clearly that if God exists at all, she must very beautiful and benevolent. She creates life, as newborn infants, and entrusts them to us. She is exquisitely beautiful in her nature and it is difficult to not believe in her, to not love her dearly in return. If you must believe then believe in the beautiful God you can see with your own eyes.

Let us take each other’s hand and climb together out of the trap. We escaped the fear of Zeus and Wotan, we can escape the fear of the angry God of Abraham, the Yahweh of the bible and the Allah of the Qur’an and all such angry punishing gods who we now can see never existed at all. We believed them in our youth and ignorance, we are grown now and putting away our childish things. We can understand now that those that spoke of them, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and all of the rest, were themselves entrapped when young by the false idea of a god that has never existed. They reached out, to believe in God, meaning well for their people and we can honor them for that. We should not dishonor them by remaining ignorant in the trap we can now all clearly see.

Let us put down all our sad scriptures, and leave them for the historians to summarize. Let us take up instead books of science and knowledge and educate all of the children of man with whom we find ourselves entrusted.

Let us educate every child, leaving no child behind. They will educate their children and this will continue through the generations until someday, just maybe, you will be reborn as one of them, a brand new baby, with brand new memory, born into this beautiful universe, all of the accumulated knowledge of man freely available to you, waiting for you to once again take the lead, to lead the children of man, and if you wish the children of your beloved creator, to lead them to galaxies of watered planets.