Many people seem to think the words "morality" and "ethics" are two different things because of the baggage the word "moral" carries with it, IE: religion. Yet, both terms describe behaviour, one chosen (ethics) and one being dictated to, or imposed upon you through religion (morals), yet both share many, if not all, of the same kinds of rules: don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, don't abuse people/kids/animals/the planet.
But, get this: we use them wrong. Morals are the chosen set of rules and ethics are the rules given to you from outside, such as the methodology of a business or the dictates from one's faith. Yeah, I've been using the words wrong, too (I used the incorrect understandings in a comment on another diary just the other day, dangit). But, I'll continue using the common understanding of them for this diary for the moment, because for me, and probably many other people, they have few enough differences between them to be no different.
I'm probably too late onto this particular bandwagon, but after reading several of the resultant diaries written in response to a pair of disastrous forays into calling us atheists "inhuman" or asking mind-bogglingly silly questions about how morals came to be if not from religion or how do atheists come by their moral-compass if not for the already-established cultures of faith and the responses therein, I felt I had to write this anyway.
Some of the following was said in a comment I wrote in one of the diaries, but I'll add some of my own history and a few other ideas to it here. My apologies for it being so long, but I tried to shorten it and still publish it before it became irrelevant. Please note that, while I can be an arrogant little shit, I've been attempting to weed this bit of nastiness out of my rather argumentative personality (with some failures, I'm sure), and so the opinions expressed here are just that, opinions. I'll try to keep it SFW, but an F-bomb or two might drop by for a visit. Hop over the sacred Orange Spaghetti Noodle for more...
My family wasn't very religious, though this would change some time after I left home at the age of sixteen. It seems that, unbeknownst to yours truly, my mother had always harboured strong beliefs in god, but had lapsed in her expression of that faith for reasons I've never been quite certain of (she later went all Evangelical on me). The Roman Catholic church she'd been raised with in Quebec was pretty narrow in what it expected of you: everything--your heart, life and soul. I say "narrow" because it only expected that "one" thing, which was "everything".
We just didn't talk about it at home. We didn't talk much, period. A singularly silent family, where quiet was the order of the day. A whole family locked under a kind of Vow of Silence. The only times I heard anyone talk much was during birthdays, the holidays or when the fists were gonna fly.
But, my mother heard all the usual: god's love, god's grace, god's protection of the faithful and it was obvious to her that either god didn't protect everyone, or she didn't deserve his protection from the beatings and rapes her father dealt out to her on a regular basis. Bear the shame stoically, live with it, don't tell anyone or they'll call you out for the slut/whore/scum/insert-soul-scarring-insult-here she must be if god would allow her family to treat her this way. She always felt rather left out in the cold, I suspect, being hurt and lonely and feeling like she had nowhere to go. And her own faith kept telling her what a woman's "place" was, how she didn't matter because of her gender, all the shining statues and prayers to the Virgin Mary notwithstanding. But, she wasn't a virgin any more was she? Her father had seen to that. So she must be something else: broken, unwholesome, a "bad girl"...
Fast-forward some decades: My mother struggled to feed us on what little her abusive husband would give her--the rest went to his partying and booze. Mum would go days without eating so I and my brother could have at least one meal a day. He'd smack her around on the least pretence, being a jealous lunatic who had some serious issues. For him, women were for fucking and being used as a punching-bag when things pissed you off. Things pissed him off a lot. When she fled that disaster of a marriage, she was alone and scared, with nowhere to actually go except away from this monster in the guise of a man. Stuck in the idea that she couldn't survive on her own, she shacked up with the first man she could. I spent a short while in a foster home where being smacked around was pretty regular. I came home a much quieter, sullen kid. Then some financial disaster struck and we were essentially homeless. I was six or seven. We ended up with the grandparents: we didn't have to live on the streets, at least. But the hit to my parent's self-esteem must have been hard, because relations slowly started to show the cracks in the seams.
Another fast-forward: life took an upswing: we had money again, and we bought a house. My mother had always wanted to have a house of her own, and I suspect there may have been some pressure on her part for the step-dad to take that big step and probably before he was ready. He caved and finally did what she wanted.
That's when the shit really hit the fan.
Like my mother, I was abused: beaten, belittled, bullied and raped from an early age. The step-dad was the source of it all. I had other history of various abuses, including rape, but that's outside the family and probably for another diary. Like her, I tried to tell someone and was told to go back to my family, to stop lying, to put it in the past, to pray for forgiveness (I must have done something to deserve this, right?), or simply mocked for "diddling Daddy".
I asked a lot of questions when I was a kid--still do. Nosy-Parker of an awkward mite, I'd look under rocks just to see what was there, dig in dirt, draw on everything, ask endless "how does this work? What does this mean? Why?" questions that drove the adults around me either to chuckles "oh, ain't she cute?" or distraction, "Good god, kid, leave me alone!" Other reactions were not so nice.
Not knowing why, but suspecting that the public-school system was a terrible place for me--I was illiterate until I was twelve and bullied constantly--my mother decided that a parochial school would give me the education she felt I needed. They were more strict (I found later how strict) and just might get past my learning-problems. While she'd been given a diagnosis of ADHD, dyslexia, "indeterminate learning delay" and that I was supposedly off-the-map smart, my mother felt that I was just being lazy. Having nuns knock me into shape was just the ticket.
Joy. Yet another school where I was the "new kid" (we moved a lot) and I was the target of the entire school's worth of bullies for the next four years... just like at every other school I'd gone to. Well, there went that idea of the public-schools being the source of those troubles. I learned, though, and my grades, while not the best, still improved, and with the help of one conscientious and kindly teacher, I was finally able to learn how to read, sparking my quest to absorb knowledge like a sponge. Then, I began devouring whole libraries.
Ever felt what it was like to be intensely creative and inquisitive (okay, insufferable), get no encouragement for it, even abused for it, only to discover just how broad the world outside your family's little universe really was and how it just made more questions that your family, it turned out, couldn't answer for you? I thought people were keeping things from me, or were just being mean. I figured adults knew everything and it seemed so unfair; they had all of this wonderful knowledge and I wasn't allowed to see it because I was a kid, I was a girl, I was bad, I was...
Missing a few chips in my meat-computer more like, but what did I know? I had the usual self-centredness and narrow experience. The adults didn't want me to question because it meant that they had to give me some kind of an answer for things they didn't know themselves. And, when your folks had no energy at the end of a work-day, or not enough education to be able to say much more than "God made it", you don't learn a whole lot. The nuns at school gave me the same kinds of non-answer: "God did it." I couldn't even ask other kids, because they all avoided me. They wouldn't have known the answers anyway.
Books became my refuge. I'd read everything, encyclopedias, comics, adult novels, the porn I'd find hidden in the house, the Bible, even the backs of cereal boxes. It was all fascinating stuff to me and so I read it all uncritically--it was just information as far as I was concerned, no "good" or "bad" attached to any of it, collected it, treasured it. Religion didn't factor into this. At least, not at first. But when I saw the nuns were serious in this prayer thing, that it was expected of all of us to participate in it and in the Catechism, I accepted it. It was kinda fun, actually. I had no place where I was loved uncritically. No place where I could hear "you are good, you are worthwhile. I love you." Religion was the closest I'd ever gotten to feeling that.
So, I went with it. I went to Mass, even on the mid-week (Wednesdays for us). Talked to the nuns and listened to what they had to say. They were also the only people ever to encourage my art, my writing and my other creative endeavours. I thank them to this day for that. I examined this whole religion thing: I liked it enough that I began to ask the nuns about how to become a priest. The idea of serving the community, of helping people, being there when someone needed a shoulder to lean on--that's what I thought priests did, outside of serving Mass. This meant something. "But, you cannot be a priest," I was told.
Hold up. What? "Why not?"
"You're a girl." Recall that these were Roman Catholic nuns and I'd no experience with other forms of Christianity.
"Pfft. What difference does THAT make? That's just plumbing!" If I can claim any good thing about my family, it's this: racism and sexism never really came up. I saw racism and bigotry outside at school and on the street, but not at home. I really didn't understand them. They seemed like mere excuses to be mean to someone, and I didn't like doing that. I found out later, that in some things my family weren't quite as tolerant, but I think I may have at least cured my mum of a good portion of the homophobia.
"Why does being a girl keep me from doing god's work?" I wasn't about to let some stupid idea that I was less for being female stop me from doing anything. It was dumb.
"It doesn't.."
I interrupted, "you just said it did! That I couldn't be a priest because I was a girl!"
A long, indrawn breath of fading patience. "Yes..."
"Well, then. Explain, and it better be good..." What then followed was a jumbled attempt at giving me the Buy-bull stuff about "thou shalt not suffer a woman to teach or speak in church" and blah, blah effing-yet-another-excuse-why-boys-got-it-better-than-girls. "But," I squawked, "but, that's not FAIR!"
And then she said it, the one thing that always makes me grit my teeth in utter rage: "That's just the way it is, dear." Patronizing and final, both. "You can still take Orders and become a nun." Oh, how she seemed to froth with excitement over the idea!
As if that was any kind of a consolation-prize. "No way!" I shot back, "I get Ordained or nuthin'!"
I hadn't been baptised, and I was just getting into my teens. My mother apparently got into a huge row with the nuns over this and told them off: "If she gets baptised, it will be because she chose it and only after she's made that decision based on knowledge." That falling out never healed between them and I never did get baptised. I never became a priest, either.
I've crucified myself in my quest to "feel" god (no nails, just rope). Nuthin'. I've prayed, danced, drummed, smoked herbs, sweated, even considered taking on the four-year responsibility of doing a sun-dance, forgetting that my Tribe had it's own moments of sexism.
I'm a Tom-boy. I got into fights. I argued. I was strong and tough and always willing to stand up for myself when I thought the adults around me were being jerks, which seemed to be always. I've had my crotch grabbed by an African neighbour for arguing with him because he couldn't believe a woman would stand up to him that way. I've stopped guys beating on their girlfriends and made them run. My mother often begged me to be more lady-like, to stop attracting so much attention (as if girls weren't supposed to be noticed), to stop being so loud. No. Just no.
In a lot of ways, I thought, acted and felt masculine, at least as far as the head-up-their-butt people of my hometown were concerned. Every day I faced the same silliness: "girls can't do that" when I asked to take metal-shop and welding in high-school. "Bull-puckey!" I said, and took the course anyway. I got A's. "Women aren't strong enough to carry a five-ream pack of printing paper..." one teacher claimed when we were off-loading a truck for our printing and graphic-arts class. A box only weighs roughly twenty-five pounds. "Seriously? Gimme that thing, you dope!" and proceeded to carry two five-pack boxes on one shoulder into the school, and several more thereafter, with no more arguments from the teacher. Fifty pounds was no big deal to me when I could carry a 200 lb man over my shoulders with little effort.
Canada has this fitness program called Participaction (I don't know if it still exists), where kids could test themselves and earn various badges--like medals, bronze, silver and gold, with one higher honour: excellent. "Why are these fitness requirements for the girls so LOW?" I asked my phys-Ed teacher. She replied that girls were not expected to be as strong as the boys, so the highest scores required were a lot lower. "Horsefeathers! Gimme the highest requirements for the guys. I'm gonna beat 'em all." And I did, and wore that silly fabric "excellent" badge on my vest for years.
My whole life has been like that, proving the men wrong.
What has this got to do with religion, or why I'm an atheist? More than you'd think. I learned that sexism and religion were inextricably bound together. One of the things that was greatly discouraged in church and Sunday school were questions that actually probed why our religious social-structure was the way it was. Women not being priests or teaching in church, having to be subservient to their husbands or men in general, issues unique to women being ignored or glossed over as being "unimportant": how did we deal with rape or getting pregnant? "Don't act or dress like a slut, you won't get raped. Don't have sex, and you won't get pregnant." Marriage? If the husband beats you? "Follow your marriage vows: obey him, pray more, be a better wife..." WTF does that even mean? Oh, yeah, do what he wants, whatever it is, take the bruises as your just due. "What if you do everything right, but he still hits you?" "Then you aren't doing everything right."
These are extremely simplified versions of real life questions, but whether the text is more florid, citing passages from the Buy-bull or what have you to convince the questioner, the answers still were pretty much the same: suck it up. Pray more. Be more devout. Expect your reward in heaven. Gee, thanks, even if my stupid abusive husband sends me there? Fuck that noise.
Now, to be honest, I've never been abused by a boyfriend or husband, at least, never for long. I knew what that looked like from my experiences at home, and fought it every step of the way, kicking them out of my life as soon as things got beyond the name-calling stage. One guy hit me. Once. He never did it again. I'm sure having a slightly pudgy 5'3" woman slam your 6' 1" carcass against a wall for being an abusive dick will make for a lousy day for one's ego. If I couldn't get him to respect me, for sure he was gonna be afraid of me.
I'm no poster-child for "how to stay out of abusive relationships". I got entangled in interpersonal nonsense most sensible people would run screaming from. I screwed up, lived on the streets, was homeless more than once through circumstance and my own stupidity. I didn't have any special info or skills. I was just pugnacious, stubborn and I knew that what I wanted mattered, even if other people refused to accept it. All I wanted? To be safe. To be free. To be able to decide my own destiny and life-direction. To learn whatever my mind could absorb. To draw, paint, make cool stuff, garden. To be loved. To have a home where I was respected and where I didn't have to bargain away my self-respect and dignity to survive like I did growing up.
In short, some folks would say I wanted a penis.
Guys could get most of that, if not all of it (especially if they were white). They expected to be able to have access to it and no one questioned that. I expected that for women, too. Why wouldn't I? I didn't know any better at the time. Until I hit the road-block called the real world, that is. I learned pretty fast that being a girl shut out a lot of the things on my list from ever coming to fruition. So did religion, I would learn.
Well, that pissed me off. I spent a long time being pissed off, not having any other method of dealing with it. I didn't know where to go, where to learn what I needed, how to get to the places I wanted to go. I muddled along, learning what I could, fighting the jerks along the way and during all of that, kept up my personal quest to find "god".
People seemed to need god. It seemed to be a requirement for their happiness, and I wondered if this was something I needed, too. Yet, I could never find this thing. Never feel it. I kept up my quest and questions, never having them answered, and this frustrated me. The closest I ever came was with the Pagan folks. They had beliefs that resonated with me deeply: a respect for nature and life, for women, for people in general, generosity was more than just a word to them. I was a Pagan for over twenty years.
By this point, religious fervour was beginning to make me nervous and question even more. Why couldn't I feel what they did? I mean, I could get into ecstatic states--those were fun, especially when I got to share it with my coven, but it never seemed to go far enough. I still didn't feel "god". I could pray, but I felt nothing. I could do all of the accepted things religion seemed to require...
...Except truly believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that god/s existed.
More books, more learning, more questions asked of people I hoped would know what they were talking about. I sought more experiences, took in more knowledge of other cultures and their faiths, dipped into anthropology, psychology, the Myth-cycle and the Hero's Quest.... and got bupkiss. It all fascinated me, still does, but in none of my digging could I find anything resembling the "god experience".
Meanwhile, my need for religion began to fade under the niggling feeling that some forms of religious fervour seemed, well... rather insane. All the talk of invisible beings, miracles, spirits, devils, saints, hell, or the Summer Lands--one name for the Pagan heaven, began to sound like nothing more than a slightly more organized version of the local schizophrenic on the street-corner talking to his personal fairies.
As a person with chronic depression that occasionally goes into delusional, hallucinatory states, I don't make that comparison lightly. Calling someone "crazy" is hugely insulting in my book. But, more and more, I kept coming up against the seemingly OCD arbitrariness of accepted ritual behaviour: prayers=wishes, wearing special clothing sounded like nothing other than a more "acceptable" tin-foil hat. The stories about the god in question would all sound like hyperbolic, exaggerated, self-aggrandizing lies if anyone tried to make similar claims about themselves. Insisting that you can speak with invisible beings sounded nuts. But people do that all the time through prayers and by "listening to their angels".
So did that homeless guy over there muttering to himself while people averted their eyes and walked past him. One was accepted, even encouraged, and the other was tolerated, pitied at best. Which is better, a cherry or a grape? (My husband chimes in here: "You win nothing if you get three grapes on a slot-machine. Three cherries, on the other hand... Cherry is obviously better." "Hush up, you," I told him.)
I found myself looking at the world through a starker lens that demanded rationality, not faith, and I learned something else: almost everything I found in religion was built to either instil fear, or alleviate it. So much of what we do is based on what we're afraid of. That was the lynch-pin. And when I started to look at the world through that filter, things began to make a LOT more sense, and religion finally failed the test of usefulness for me and my life...
All through this jumbled mess of a lifelong quest for meaning, my morals/ethics had remained the same: fairness above all, don't hurt people, don't lie, don't take their stuff, and things like "don't rape/kill/beat up people, etc." seemed like no-brainers to me. Religion never seemed to be connected to that. I was hunting in the wrong place for meaning, it seemed: my morals were fine as they were.
Humanity has been learning, changing and evolving for millions of years, and for all of that time, our ability to discern patterns in the world around us has also changed, grown and evolved. I suggest thinking of our mental/religious growth like a "lifespan": in our "childhood" when we were coming out of the Savannahs of Africa, natural forces were mysterious, frightening, unfathomable. When we learned to crawl as "toddlers", our thinking matured along with our species, those natural forces were thought of as alive, with wills and agendas of their own: gods. Now, edging toward "adulthood", we are beginning to shed our imaginary friends of childhood and we are slowly learning how much of nature "works" and we don't see mysterious, unfathomable forces or gods as much as we did when we were "younger".
But, there had to have been a time when our family groups were becoming societies and certain behaviours that were detrimental to the group became undesirable: things that hurt the group. We learned to cooperate long before we developed religion, and those behaviours useful for cooperation were likely the earliest examples of morals/ethics/acts of altruism: social grooming, feeding each other, helping the old or injured, stopping someone from attacking another member of the troop, etc.
We also had the earliest acts of "evil": murder, rape, violence, theft, lying... Yes, Chimps have been shown to be able to lie Other animals lie, too, and in some creative and funny ways. They know it's wrong, but it gets them what they want. Morals/ethics needing religion to exist? I don't think so.
Cetaceans exhibit similar kinds of interactions, as do corvids, ants and bees. From my reading into the various fields--not any kind of expert, me, but I do like to read some esoteric things, and not from (one person called them) "non-accredited colleges", but books written by university professors from places like Harvard--I suspect that most anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists might agree with that idea.
Later, religion became a tool for the unscrupulous and the greedy to exert control over large masses of people to prevent unrest, create cohesiveness, encourage an "Us vs them" mentality and to prevent the populace from fighting back against obviously unfair and cruel practices by tribal leaders. They found that, by playing upon people's fears, loneliness, emotional vulnerability and need for certainty, they could control them, lie to them, take their money, abuse them unmercifully, make war on other Tribes... All in the name of religion.
Allow thousands of years to pass: religion is entrenched, it's "normal", no other culture seems to lack a religion, and so we think it is human "nature" to believe in the supernatural. When you cannot figure out a simple thing like a rainbow (water droplets acting like a prism when sunlight hits it from behind), or why it's wrong to hurt others without some invisible non-being to tell you not to (the simplest explanation being, "I would hate it if someone did that to me, so why should I do that to them?"), it's obvious to me that critical-thinking won't be that person's best skill. For them, it's more comforting to believe in things like religion. It gives them the answers they want, makes them feel included, and offers reassurance. What more do they want or need, right?
TL;DR: I think moral behaviour evolved long before religion did. Religion grew from a need to explain things to our progeny: teaching them how to survive, a need to have certainty: "Will the sun rise again?" and a need for comfort: "Where do we go when we die?" As such, it was useful, even necessary. But, now it's a road-block to progress, to our continued growth. Religion will stunt us if we continue to allow it to rule us.
Some of us want more, and so we do the unpopular thing: we question, we attack the shibboleth and knock it down, we pull back Great Oz's curtain to show the charlatan hiding behind it. We de-bunk, we prove or disprove. We use science, or logic. We THINK. We're not smarter, nor are we atheists better. Some of us are arrogant, many are as humble as any monk. We get stuff wrong--everyone does. A moral-compass isn't dependant upon religious belief to exist: we choose our moral behaviours--through whatever process---and hopefully, act upon them in ways that mean fairness and justice for those around you. A final analogy: don't you think it's a wiser course to find out how the engine works so we can repair it or rebuild it, rather than just trusting in faith that it will always keep working if we feed it "food" and perform the rituals needed to keep it "happy"? Just a thought.
And I like both cherries and grapes. Equally. So there.
Cheers!