To continue the arguing started a week ago, let’s examine the second hypothesis: the role of religion in the moral values of society is irreplaceable. The way to start the deliberation, my way at least, is to get rid of the prejudice and human arrogance leading us to think that we alone are moral beings. It is now well recognized that social animals demonstrate empathy, compassion, grief, comfort, assistance, trust, forgiveness, reciprocity, and a sense justice, revenge and spite [see, for instance, Wild justice: The moral lives of animals by M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, University of Chicago Press, 2009]. Those traits are actually moral systems needed for a particular social species’ behavior. And one more step, just in case, remember that we are risen apes, not fallen angels.

We are born moral animals. We don’t need religion to keep us from being amoral and lawless. We are a social species with a high capacity for cooperation. Our ancestors could not have survived as species in social forms, from tribes and clans to cities and states, without an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair - however those terms were interpreted at a given time of our history. The evolution of our moral behaviors went along with the evolution of our sociability. We are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest. Throughout our history, the increasing social complexity required building of moral complexity where religion - which is not a separate function of our brain but integrated into the brain networks used in our social cognition - did play recognizable role in certain historical periods. Thanks, but because of the religion’s unwanted advances, enough of it.