Via the Humanist Symposium, I found one of the clearest and most concise descriptions of natural human morality that I’ve ever read. Here’s a bit:

Our concept that there is such a thing as right and wrong is hardwired into us by our evolution. We have a sort of universal “moral grammar”, but not a universal “moral language”. For instance: The notion it is wrong to harm an innocent person is universal, but specific notions of who is innocent and who is not innocent are far from being universal.

Read the rest here. As a non-theist who frequently hears from family that it’s “impossible” to find morality without God, this makes so much sense to me.

Rather than coming up with a title on my own, I’ll steal the title of the post I’m linking. Via Carnival of the Godless, I came across Holy Smoke at A Load of Bright. He compares quitting religion (as I did through December, then formally announced as of the first of 2007) to quitting smoking (which I did almost instantly in January 2004, even before I knew I was pregnant). It’s a striking comparison to me — one that resonates with me.

A sampling:

One question that is often asked of atheists is, “how are you going to replace religion? People need religion. If you take it away, what are you going to put in its place?” Many atheists answer this question on face value, normally with an outline of secular humanism. This is correct in a sense, but the question is actually heavily loaded. It assumes that people need religion. Do they really?

I used to think I needed cigarettes like I needed food. At times, when I was broke in university, I would scrape pennies from the floor of my car and the backs of couches to buy cigarettes while my cupboards were bare. “I need a cigarette”, I’d tell my bemused housemates, “I need one”. When you smoke, you are imbibing poison into your body. If there is one thing that, by definition, your body never needs, it is poison. I didn’t need a cigarette. I needed food. If you don’t eat, you die. If you don’t smoke, not only do you not die, you live longer! It’s easy for me to say that now, but at the time I was convinced that it was an essential.

Just as we are all born atheists, we are all born non-smokers. Do people really need religion, or do they just not know any better? Obviously, not all people need religion – the existence of happy atheists proves that. So why would some people need it and not others?

Over time, I’ve found myself filled with nearly zero angst about my walking away from religion in general, Christianity in particular. When I first even contemplated (not out loud, even — just in my head) the idea that God might just not be, the emptiness wasn’t unlike the craving for a cigarette — a loss that, had I not fed an addiction, I wouldn’t have ever recognized.

These days, when I consider religion, it’s largely in relation to how I’m raising my daughter, and how I can coach her to think critically about everything she encounters, even “truths” that I might tell her. Someday, she might be atheist/agnostic. She might be Christian. She might be Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or a New Age flake. Whichever she becomes, my wish is that she will have spent time genuinely considering *why* she believes what she does.

From the comments on Hemant’s blog:

Reflecting over these events as an adult, I have come to the conclusion that deeply religious people are similar to individuals with personality disorders in that they simply cannot attach. They have learned to mimic the motions of normal human behavior but the hamster has left the wheel.

A little timeline:

• One week ago today, I got a positive result on an early (super early, like 10 days post-ovulation) pregnancy test.
• The weekend was a bit nasty in terms of the husband and I working out unexpected emotions re: said test — even though we were TRYING.
• By Monday, I warned the husband that with my temperature shift, I was fairly sure I was going to miscarry.
• Tuesday, I miscarried.

If I hadn’t been paying attention to symptoms, I’d have never even known I’d been pregnant in the first place. Annnnyway…

I had a meeting planned with my local counselor for Monday, and the timing couldn’t have been better — after a quick (eh, okay, long) rant from me about the weekend, I told her that I didn’t want to fuss about my husband, because hell…I can’t control him. I can, on the other hand, control me. What she pointed out that she sees in me is a bit of difficulty attaching. She also mentioned that she can see some of the same in my husband, but demonstrated in different ways (qualified that, of course, she only “knows” him through my stories).

So, me being me, I read. And read. And yeah, I saw some of myself — but not as much as I would have seen, say, 10 years ago.

Back to the quote from Hemant’s place, this comment really jumped off the page at me — as you might imagine, given my background and past week. I’m not looking for one more emotional issue to blame on religion (I have enough of those!), but it does shed a little light on myself as a younger person. I honestly think it took me until my early 30s (and my first work with a counselor — see the earliest posts of this blog) for me to learn to become a genuine, authentic person. Until then, I just kept role-playing, trying desperately to read what I was “supposed to be” and to try to “be that” (often unsuccessfully).

No conclusions from this. Just thinking out loud…

Back to my hole now. At some point, I should give an update on my life, huh? Or perhaps, answer the questions Sage asked me eons ago?

I think I would have had a very different answer to this quiz even a short year ago — I would have been much more angry and theist. Now, I feel quite at peace with where I am in my life. That’s a good feeling.

Okay, but I’ll make one anyway. The other day, on the phone with my Dad, we had a very brief (like barely touching on it) conversation about a political article I sent him — one that I told him helped me to perhaps have a slightly better understanding of the culturally conservative mindset. He admitted that he hadn’t read the article yet because if I read something, then I’ll really have to think about it and come to conclusions about it. At a later point in the conversation, this same logic applied to religion, and how he was completely unwilling to even speculate about whether there’s a God — because where could those kinds of thoughts lead???

Oh, the horrors. But then, I know this quite well. I remember clearly the first day after I first questioned whether God existed. I felt somehow let down and lonely — like I just found out a friend had died. I quickly tried to shove that Pandora’s box closed again, but it had been opened, and eventually, I arrived to where I am now. Non-religious whatsoever. I still have a spiritual component to my life, but it has nothing to do with the Christianity with which I grew up.

So, I guess the point is this: his fear is somewhat justified. But is it worthwhile to ignore what might be real, just because you might not like the answers?

“It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.” Gallileo

There’s so much meaning in those words. Read them a time or two…or ten. I know I’m going to.

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I absolutely cannot wait for this book to come out.

Look at that photo. Then look at it again. Then read the comments on the photo at the book’s site. It’s delicious.

Hat tip: Agnostic Mom, who happens to be one of the essay authors.

I’ve touched on this subject before, and now that I’ve formally declared as agnostic, if not outright atheist, it’s something I feel even more strongly about.

One does not need to have a religion in order to behave in a moral, ethical manner.

Here’s a little reading on the subject, since I’m lacking time for a comprehensive post at the moment:

Living in America, this discussion usually plays out in terms of Judeo-Christian beliefs. The most common criticism about atheists is that without belief in God, we have no ethics or morals. A recent letter to the editor said, “No system of ethics … can stand alone. To make [ethics] understandable to a child, it must be clothed in religious terms, such as having an omniscient, omnipotent father in Heaven.” I completely disagree.

When a child hits another and the second child cries, the first one doesn’t need to have read the Bible or gone to Sunday school to know his action was wrong. Nor does he need to fear eternal damnation to discourage him from doing it again.

I try to teach my children right from wrong with a simple principle that most Christians will recognize. “How would you like it if Johnny took all the toy trucks and wouldn’t share them with you?” It’s not as eloquent as “do unto others,” but the message is the same and it gets the point across.

hat tip: Friendly Atheist

I’ve been seriously delinquent with posting a follow-up on last week’s thoughts about prayer. I had a long IM conversation with one friend (she’s given permission to post it), then Kate had some great thoughts in the comments.

The follow-up is coming soon. Promise.

Miscellany from today’s Humanist Network News:

Is Humanism a Religion?

Humanism, at least in any of the groups that I have joined — The Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) and the Society of Ontario Freethinkers (SOFREE) — does not require any oath or initiation ritual outside of filling in a contact information form and a check. If that qualifies humanism as a religion then I also belong to the Church of the Credit Union, The Holy Order of the Curling Club and The Divine Path of Too Many Credit Cards.

Oooh. The Divine Path of Too Many Credit Cards *snort*. That one is entirely too familiar — though not currently, and I plan to never rejoin that one again.