Atheism: the default ethical position of humanity

Of 1,500 respondents, 90 per cent chose “permissible” even though most, both the religious and the non religious could not adequately explain why.

For those wishing to know the reason they selected “permissible” here is the explanation: in almost all societies, it is “forbidden” to kill an innocent person deliberately, so it must be wrong to say such killing is “obligatory”. In this particular case, however, one or more deaths will occur whatever the respondent decides, but fewer will occur if the switch is flipped, so “permissible” is at least the lesser of two evils.

However, in prosperous democracies, statistical evidence of religious sectors in communities or even whole countries, as is the case with the USA, show a clear correlation between greater religious observance and higher numbers of dysfunctional characteristics.

The following extract is from a study by Gregory S Paul:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the US, is exceptional, but not in the manner, Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the US as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious US is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

The apparent discrepancy that on the one hand, religious and nonreligious persons make similar ethical decisions and, on the other hand, a study demonstrating religion equates with dysfunction is clearly understandable and one supports the other on investigation of both cases presented. The Singer/Hauser paper dealt with specific hypothetical circumstances unrelated to any particular religion where the subjects used innate abilities. Gregory Paul however, cast a far wider net in statistically correlating dysfunctional societies with various amounts of religiosity.

Evolution has supplied us with the ability to make ethical decisions but religions can interfere with this natural process and produce mayhem.

We fail to heed a lesson of such importance at our peril.