Love and Gods
Religious people often talk about love in religious terms, asserting that you couldn’t even have love, or feel love, or express love, without first believing in their God.
But love was around long before religion.
In that same way, morality is more basic than religion. There are reasons not to steal, or to kill people, reasons that are really, when you think about it, written into the human genome.
We are this way because we evolved to be this way — a tribal/herd/pack critter that had to love (or at least accept) the members of its own tribe. Later, as intelligent beings in a greatly more complex society, we had to find ways to expand that regard to larger groups.
Godders suffer a cart-before-the-horse mistake when they fail to see that this stuff underlies religion rather than the other way around.
Believe it, jesuschristians: The rest of us have love, and morals, and all sorts of stuff you think you have, and we have it without believing in your god. Also, a lot of the things that people would do for religious reasons, I might do for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the way the human animal is, and the way things work in our minds.
So: Goddy people … stop attempting to steal love, and morality, and all this other stuff, and claim it as your own. You’re just muddying the waters, at a very critical time here on Planet Earth.
Besides which, sometimes you get it so goddam wrong it’s just nasty.
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This is post 7 of 12 of Blue Collar Atheist’s Blogathon in support of the Secular Student Alliance. Donate by clicking the “Contribute” link in the SSA ad over in the right column. Or go to the Secular Student Alliance directly.
Or just click this button (It’s the exact color of Pepto-Bismol, isn’t it? Makes me think it’s a way of saying “I’m sick of how powerful religion is in our society, and I want young people to be offered this other choice.”) :
