In the course of humanity, or at least in the course of my life and as far back in the past that i can see (given my short span of life as opposed to the ~160,000 years of human civilization – no I don’t invest in the 5/6,000 year theory) there has been an evident effort to make people do right and wrong, and perhaps this links to my last post The Eternal Question of Right/Wrong, but this time, I’m putting a new spin on it and asking a question that pertains to it, but tackles a different issue; Anyhow, back to what i was saying, there seems to be an enormous effort, millions and billions invested in ‘keeping control’, in making sure that society doesn’t self destruct; now before i go into the forms of control, or what manages it, i have to ask the question; how the hell do you define what is right and wrong? and this is not a jab at the efforts, but really, just a blatant question; i mean, you gotta ask yourself, isn’t your definition of right and wrong.. your definition?! Anyway, that is a long and tough discussion and I’ll hopefully touch on it wherever i can as i go along.

First of all, let’s explore the history of this phenomenon, in a general view, religion has played a big part to defining these parameters, and not necessarily the big three, but any religion really; because in the end of the day, what is a religion really (aside from the theological aspect) but a set of rules and values? Religions have been the basis for forming governments, now I’m not talking about our current day secularist states, I’m referring back to those days when the church/mosque/synagogue/temple/be-it-what-it-may was the long deep hole in the whirlpool that was the empire. Exploring the effects and outcomes of having a religion as a basis for government is another lengthy discussion, but to sum it all up in two simple sentences:

Internally: Too far-fetched, too many cases, too many different outcomes — I’ll explore it further if and when requested to do so

Externally: I’m not even going to go there; too many lives have been lost, and too many futures have been ravaged – hurts to even think about it

In recent history, however, a number of government’s have split religion from governance, and kept religion in the private realm while respecting all forms of faith and allowing it to intermingle and live in harmony, so long as it doesn’t end up having parties vying for each others’ blood or destruction; but anyway, let me get back to my point:

If we were to assume that all the world turned secularist overnight, that there were no longer efforts to establish theocratic governments; where do we extract our common morality from? In an ideal world, with no history or past bloodshed/sacrifice to fall back on, we would start from a clean slate in coming together and collectively (or at least in a utilitarian way) deciding on what we feel should be permitted/outlawed and onwards; realistically though, our past few millenniums of an infatuation with religious laws will somehow impact our decisions on what is right and wrong. Which brings me to a statement that is regularly said to me in many discussions; but before i present the question, let me quickly run through the topic to simplify matters: the discussion is usually based on “if there was no religion, what defines right or wrong?”, or better said “where do we get our sense of right and wrong?” – and the statement usually is: “from religion; that is what makes you perceive things to be right, or to be wrong”.

Now before i go into a debate on this, I refer you to my piece Origin of Values where i touch on this subject (if you can’t see what i mean, read on, it all culminates in the last paragraph); But from my point of view, i don’t see religions as creators of values, believing that would assume that humanity was a chaotic jungle right before religion popped up and then somehow sanity was brought into play, now that’s not to say that religion hasn’t fixed a few things that had been going right before it, but again that doesn’t mean that there was no sanity prior to it. To me, there are some basic instincts that humans all share, no matter what culture, no matter what race, age, gender, etc. We all know that when someone steals something from you, that it makes you feel unfairly done by, we all know that if someone murders a loved one, that there is a great deal of remorse; can we all agree that these two things are wrong? can we all agree that there should be laws that prevent people from doing that? And if you think I’m being way too general with my analogies, it’s only because i’d like to simplify things for a start, before going into more difficult aspects to judge on.

In any case, to me, it is rather simple; there are basic fundamentals that are simply wrong, you don’t need a dogma to tell you that; call it animal instinct, call it emotional intelligence, call it basic common sense; in any case, i don’t see how a secularist government can’t possibly succeed in creating laws that respect all people and provide for the welfare of all; not to be too idealistic, i do foresee many conflicts in the way, but that is honestly beside the point and the objective. I can’t possibly imagine how that would be achieved through a government that bases its laws on it’s religion’s own rules