I’ve been following this thread with considerable interest since Sanctus started it, and thinking about the various things people have written, without feeling I had much to contribute to it, but I’m going to try out a little essay here and see what happens. Seems to me we have essentially three kinds of contributors here: the true believers, doubters who aren’t sure if there’s anything of substance here and aren’t ready to come down on either side of the fence, and atheists. I count myself among that last group, as most of you know, so the question in the thread title--how can we get rid of our sinfulness?-- strikes me as essentially meaningless, because sin is a concept rooted in religious belief, of which I have none. But the source of moral values and the meaning of good and evil are things even atheists need to address, if they’re going to make any claim to intellectual honesty.
The theistic assumption is that morals require an ultimate source that must be outside of human beings. Essentially it’s a belief that a lawmaker is required for every law, but logic compels us to ask, what is the source of the lawmaker’s values? Another lawmaker? And what is the source of that lawmakers values? Logic produces an infinite regression, and it’s completely arbitrary where anyone chooses to stop it. Assuming the need for a lawmaker outside of human beings doesn’t solve the problem it’s intended to solve.
The real prompter of moral behaviour is something in human nature that operates at a deeper level than theological belief. Buddhists and Jainists, for instance, as that little essay I linked to previously indicates, are non-theists, and don’t think anyone could credibly argue they’re uniquely immoral because of that, or even that I as an atheist am uniquely immoral. Laws, both written and unwritten, and the sanctions for transgressions, are really the result of a social process. Humans are fully capable of setting up systems of rules and functioning within them without recourse to divine fiats. There is no good or evil in the absence of living creatures with competing needs, and we make up our own rules to deal with that.
Consider some basic facts of life. We all share the same basic survival and growth needs. There are genetically determined behaviours that cross all cultures, like sociability; we are not infinitely malleable. Most normal humans respond with similar feelings to similar events. We all share the same planetary environment, we share common needs, common problems and pleasures, so we easily identify with each other and share goals. We all experience the same laws of nature, they affect us all the same way. And finally, the rules of logic and evidence apply universally, so we have a common way to argue and discuss things. (Wish I could remember where I first read that paragraph; it’s not original with me.)
No explanation is required for why people pursue human interests and relate laws and institutions to human concerns. Morality is rooted in our common recognition of the need for cooperation and our common emotional responses. Postulating a higher law is what needs explanation. To me it looks like an attempt to end argument and discussion and begin coercion. That’s what the original morality tale in the Old Testament is about. God puts Adam and Eve into the garden, tells them they can eat and drink anything they find, “except for that one tree over there,” he says, “the day you touch that you die.” That turned out not to be true, but that’s neither here nor there. If god actually has the characteristics generally ascribed to him, he knew exactly what’d happen, and in fact any sensible person with any knowledge of human nature could’ve predicted it too. That was a set up, and the beginning of religiously-based coercion. I do not of course believe in the literal truth of that tale, but I have no respect for or belief in a god who’d do that, even metaphorically.
