Morality Evolved Without Any God, Religion And Scripture

By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam 6 April 2024 "Those, blinded by god and religion, will never concede that morality evolved without any god, religion and scripture." Bertrand Russell's aforementioned statement from his book 'The Value of Philosophy' discards religion and god's role in shaping humankind's morality. Mind you, Russell was not an outright atheist. He was an agnostic. Yet, he totally pooh-poohed the belief, held by religionists and believers, that religion and god helped humankind evolve morality. Here, I don't want to dwell upon the morality of an atheist as I've discussed this subject ad nauseam in New Age Islam and several other publications and portals. The advent of collective morality took thousands of years to evolve. Morality is not a capsule or a commandment sent by an imaginary god, propounded by man-made religions and spread by antediluvian scriptures. In other words, it never had a definite esoteric template (for further moral development). Morality is conscientious behaviour, rather spirit, that developed with human consciousness and conscience. It evolved with humans' collective sense of propriety and cognitive skills. And don't ask foolishly as to who gave conscience and consciousness to humans? No; no god gave this to humans. We developed this during our long and arduous process of evolution. Humans are constantly evolving and we have always been in the process of evolution. That we still need the help of god and religion to understand our morality is proof that we're not yet fully evolved. If you believe that morality came from religion and god, will you emulate certain actions of your revered characters? Will anyone, let alone Muslims, marry his son's wife just because Muhammad married the (former) wife of his son Zayd? Will you still have a retinue of slaves just because all three Semitic faiths and their gods justified slavery? Will you kill a Dalit for reciting Vedas just because Ram beheaded Shambuk for reciting verses from the Vedas? Shambuk was a Dalit. Will you approve of killing Bali and Meghnad / Indrajit (Ravan's son) on the sly? Would all women follow Draupadi's example of living with five husbands despite opting for Arjun? Will you approve of the 'enlightened' Buddha's action when he refused to initiate his step-mother Mahaprajapati Gotmi when she wanted to join Buddha's Sangh (order) because the 'enlightened' Buddha was against women's entry into the religious order? It was Ananda, Buddha's favourite disciple, who convinced Buddha to accept his old step-mother as a monk. Buddha apologised and had the magnanimity to admit that he was far from being enlightened. When Jain Agamas repeatedly state that women are incapable of salvation and create a kind of equivocal scriptural morality, will any sane individual accept that? Should women accept it as their 'flawed' spiritual fate? All these instances have been culled from mankind's utterly bogus faiths and from the 'teachings' of equally useless so-called 'prophets'. Can such instances from religious books form a platform on which humanity's model of morality will ever be able to stand firmly? Never. Morality is zeitgeist. It's the spirit of times. Morality also evolves with the passage of times and is never static. Nietzsche said the same thing. He didn't offer or postulate any new or alternative morality. Nor did Ayn Rand claim to give a new set of morality to the world as if it were a pair of clothes. They urged us to rejig our sense of morality. Nietzsche's Ubermensch (Superman in German) didn't give birth to caste system, apartheid, slavery etc. Caste system in Hinduism is more than 2 thousand-yr-old. Poor Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900. Apartheid and discrimination between the blacks and whites have always existed. It still exists. Nietzsche said, "New humans, with a new morality and new sense of awareness, will be above all man-made discrimination." Please read his two books, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and 'The Dawn of the Day.' He exhorts humans to question the turbid and ambiguous morality that came from religions. "What your conscience approves without qualms and scruples is your morality, " he stated in his book 'On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense.' Morality as a religious debris must be thrown away. He talked of rationality and non-religio-spiritual goodness of mankind. Yuval Noah Harari also says the same thing. Ayn Rand may be a populist philosopher, she developed a philosophical system, known as Objectivism. Remember, morality is distilled and filtered spirit extracted from the accumulated human wisdom over an inordinately long span of time. Lastly, "We also know that modern man was at constant war with the other species of humans until they completely genocided every other species about ten thousand years ago." Who were the other species of humans the writer is talking about? Let me quote Salman Rushdie, "Religion and god indeed befuddle the most intelligent of humans. But are they really intelligent is the question that remains to be answered. " I've nothing further to say. ---- A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian. 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