"Why won't God heal amputees?"

There is nothing you have said which would cause me any trouble understanding. Your idea is that it can't be proven God does not exist.
In the same way then, it can't be proven the Tooth Fairy doesn't exist. Also it can't be proven that The Tooth Fairy is not more powerful than God.

That leaves your God can't be proven not to exist argument with no more or less credibility than The Tooth Fairy argument. Nothing difficult to understand in that.

 

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins

 

lkh,

these are some good posts. i agree with much of them. did you write this stuff yourself? if not, where are they from? thanks

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-2251248.html

A head for trouble
We like to think it’s our choice to help an old lady across the road or push her into the traffic. But an increasing number of scientists say we’re fooling ourselves. Are some of us just hard-wired to be bad? John Cornwell reports

Neuroscientists are calling it “the most interesting case history in the world” and it involves a nice man who became a paedophile because he had a brain tumour. The life of the gentle, intelligent 40-year-old schoolteacher, known as Mr C by his doctors at the university medical centre at Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States, first started to go off the rails five years back. Totally out of character, he began visiting paedophiliac websites. Next he was making sexual advances to his young stepdaughter, so his wife had him arrested for child molestation. On the point of going to jail, he complained of severe headaches, and a benign tumour the size of an egg was discovered in the “prefrontal” area of his brain. After the op his paedophiliac urges vanished, and he returned to normal.

Doctors theorised that the tumour had restricted blood supply to the area of the brain associated with impulse control. Last year the tumour came back, and so did the paedophiliac urges. He has had a second operation and, for the time being, appears to be his old decent self.

Most cultures in the world believe that virtue and vice involve an individual’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, and to freely choose one or the other – unless they are insane or acting under unbearable duress or intoxication. The laws of most societies assume moral decisions are made in the conscious, rational mind. But an influential number of brain researchers disagree. They point to cases like that of Mr C to argue that it is not people, or minds, that commit bad acts, but their brains.

As Roy Fuller, one of the men who invented Prozac, notoriously declared, “Behind every crooked thought there lies a crooked molecule.” We would say, “The man raped a child,” but the brain scientist would say something like: “A decrease in the subject’s serotonergic neurotransmission, due to a decrease in his level of serotonin, led to behaviour disinhibition.”

Believing that brains cause responsible acts, good and bad, focuses sharp attention on a rapidly expanding discipline called neuro-ethics: the brain science of morality. Are the scientists about to offer explanations – solutions, even – for crime, brutality and violence? Or are they talking dangerous nonsense?

“What the late 20th century was for molecular genetics,” says Professor Martha Farah, a leading researcher in neuro-ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, “the early 21st century is proving to be for neuroscience.” Rapid advances in non-invasive brain-imaging are enabling scientists to study moral and emotional processes, including paedophiliac behaviour, in individual brains.

We already have the drugs to enhance mood (lithium and Prozac), concentration (Ritalin) and memory (Aricept). Will we one day have a drug to regulate moral behaviour? “It brings closer the untoward potential consequences of biologically engineered morality,” says Dr Laurence Tancredi, a psychiatrist who practises law in New York.

He predicts a “new society” in which “moral” aberrations will be predicted, and corrected by drugs. “Neuro-ethics,” says Professor Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics (LSE), “is raising important questions about how we configure the boundaries of the normal and the pathological, the treatable and the acceptable… the kind of humans we want to be.”

Crude connections between the brain and our behaviour have long been familiar. Take the railroad worker Phineas P Gage, a decent chap who in 1848 suffered a prefrontal-lobe injury when an iron rod shot through his skull while he was dynamiting a tunnel in Vermont. He survived but became a foul-mouthed lout. Then there was the 1979 “Twinkie defence” trial, in which Dan White, who had shot dead the mayor and the city supervisor of San Francisco, George Moscone and Harvey Milk, was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because, as the public saw it, the jury accepted that White had simply eaten too many cupcakes that day, the sugar in his brain turning him into a killer.

In 1992, also in America, a Mr Weinstein was charged with strangling his wife to death during an argument and throwing her body out of the 12th-floor window of their apartment to make it look like suicide. A positron emission tomography (Pet) scan, revealing “sliced” images of Weinstein’s brain, showed up an arachnoid cyst. His psychiatrist claimed that the tumour had caused metabolic imbalances leading to poor impulse control; allowing the scan led to the lesser plea charge of manslaughter. Three years later, a charity manager, William Aramony, was charged with embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund a lavish lifestyle. But his defence lawyers argued that it was his brain that stole the money and not him. He could not form the requisite criminal intent for embezzlement, argued the defence, because his brain had been shrinking during most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a fact that could be substantiated by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. In the event, the prosecution agreed to a plea bargain favourable to the defence.

It is universally accepted that alcohol and drugs can be detrimental to moral behaviour. Evidence that our diet can also alter our actions has been demonstrated in a research trial at a maximum-security British prison when a zinc supplement was added to prisoners’ food, culminating in a significant reduction, it was claimed, of the rate of reoffending. At a recent symposium it was seriously proposed that zinc be introduced into drinking water, like fluoride, to combat criminality.

Quite how cupcakes, or zinc, make good people bad and bad people good is by no means clear. But with every passing week, scientists learn more about the complex action of brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters on our emotions and our behaviour, including learning, memory, decision-making and anger. At the same time, brain scans taken while people perform a variety of cognitive and emotional processes, including lying and fantasising about sex, have located specific areas in the brain crucial to decision-making. What neuroscience is telling us, moreover, is that while brains are broadly similar, they are also highly individual. There are crucial processes in early foetal development that owe less to genes than to “epigenetic” (beyond genetic) competition between migrating cells, thus guaranteeing the uniqueness of each member of the human species – even in the case of monozygotic twins.

Arguably, liars, thieves, muggers and paedophiles, like saints, philanthropists and Good Samaritans, are not bad or good – just “different”, their brains having disposed them to behaviour outside the moral norm. The eminent American neuroscientist Professor Terry Sejnowski once told me his work had made him less prone to judge others: “Neuroscience teaches us that all our drives and compulsions are unequal.” The religious doctrines of original sin – meaning we are prone to prefer wrong by nature – conscience and free will have been eroded by rationalism, science and secularism over the past two centuries, yet a powerful belief in responsibility for our actions remains – in family life, friendships, soap operas, newspapers and the criminal-justice system. The tendency to find excuses for bad behaviour was inherent in Freud. But it was neuroscience, which took off in the mid-1980s, that accelerated the process.

With the collapse of communism, a large slice of American national science funding was diverted, as part of the post-cold-war peace dividend, into the biology of the brain. The anticipated payoff was the promise, touted by the pharmaceutical industry, that the US economy could save $350 billion a year by reducing brain-related problems including Alzheimer’s, depression, workplace stress and, above all, violence. The 1990s came to be called the Decade of the Brain. This brainstorming was sweet music to thinkers bent on putting to rest for ever the ancient notion that our minds are separate from our bodies. As Patricia Churchland has put it, “human beings are not controlled by a spooky-stuff soul.” Churchland, who styles herself a neuro-philosopher, announced a new age in which brain states would explain the human condition.

 

(continued)

One of her gurus was the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick. At a neuroscience meeting in Orlando in 1996, I listened to Crick declaring: “Your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Later he invited me to tea at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where he asserted, waving a blue teapot in the air: “Neuroscience will give us a more authentic causal explanation for human behaviour than unscientific and hence unreliable folk psychology.” By folk psychology he meant history, fiction, memoir, poetry, philosophy and religion.

Crick was not alone in believing that the whole of our mental life, including our choices and our sense of responsibility, is no more than a kind of determined chemical software program running in a computer-like brain. Being good means an efficient program; being bad – paedophilia, rape, theft, lying, murder – means a defective program. Against this background, it seems feasible to correct a defective program with mind-altering drugs like Prozac.

Philosophers, too, have long suggested that personal responsibility is an illusion. The British professor Sir Freddie Ayer, famous for his BBC Brains Trust stints, claimed there was no such thing as good or bad acts: merely feelings of “boo!” or “hurrah!” The French philosopher Jacques Derrida taught that a person was just a series of stories from which emerges the illusion of a self – and how is one good or bad without a self?

But the most notorious attack on individual responsibility was the result of a wacky research programme, still in progress, devised by a lean individual in big glasses called Benjamin Libet. Libet sought in the early 1980s to prove that our brains and nervous systems commit us to a choice before we are even conscious of taking it. Volunteers were asked to flick their wrists, while noting on a special clock the precise point at which they made the decision to do it. With the use of an electroencephalogram (EEG), Libet found that the nervous activity, known as readiness potential (RP), preceded the action by up to 400 milliseconds: that is, almost half a second. The philosophers Daniel Dennett and Daniel M Wegner find confirmation in Libet’s research for their argument that free will is essentially a fiction; Wegner calls it a “cognitive feeling”. In 2004 another research team claimed to have repeated Libet’s findings at Oxford University, using a scan known as fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers identified three precise points in the brain where blood flow intensified when the volunteers deliberately moved a finger in three sections of the prefrontal area: 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second, before consciousness of
the intention took place.

For Dennett, morality has been hard-wired into us through evolution. Behaviour that has distinct survival advantages for our species – such as generosity and helping others – we have come to call “good”; that which doesn’t, such as murder, we have labelled “bad”. Tancredi, the lawyer psychiatrist and author of a new book, Hardwired Behaviour, believes that morality acquires its timelessness and universality from the brain that all humans share: “The limbic structures of the brain, often referred to as the old brain – old in the evolutionary sense – are the physical circuitry for our emotional responses, fear, disgust, guilt, to the environment.” He believes that these circuits work in partnership with the prefrontal lobe, the area of the cortex beyond the forehead that considers the facts and checks them against a particular set of emotions. “We feel shame, for example if we fail an exam through staying up all night at a party,” he argues, “because we have been trained from childhood to understand that our parents and friends will look disparagingly at our failure. Over time we internalise that emotional response and automatically feel shame whenever we are not successful.”

Under the scrutiny of neuroscience, it is possible to medicalise pretty much anything. “Some of the seven deadly sins,” claims Tancredi, “have already been shown to be affected by biological factors in varying degrees, and in some cases, the individual may have little power or free will to prevent them from happening.” Gluttons, for example, or excessive eaters, may be suffering from a condition whereby hunger and satiation messages are being sent to a part of the brain associated with reward circuits in addiction. Hence obesity may result from abnormalities over which individuals have no control. The slothful may be suffering from depression that results in a lack of desire to act. “This is clearly a biological condition,” says Tancredi, “as we know that in depression major neurotransmitters, in particular serotonin, have been decreased in the synapses.”

Lying can result from a serious brain abnormality. Korsakoff’s syndrome involves a disorder that affects memory. Unlike other patients with memory problems, who readily acknowledge their gaps, the Korsakoff’s patient will fill the gap with memories of events that did not happen or that happened in the distant past. Then there is lust – the power of sexual arousal to influence a person’s behaviour for good or ill, leading to anything from adultery to rape to murder. A condition known as Kluver-Bucy syndrome, caused by acute herpes simplex encephalitis (swelling of the brain), can result in hypersexuality. “In children,” comments Tancredi, “this may be manifested by intermittent thrusting of the pelvis, holding of one’s genitals, or rubbing the genitals in a masturbatory movement on the bed.” One can only imagine the accusations and punishments visited on such children before the condition was recognised for what it was.

In a recent study at Montreal University in Quebec, a neuroscience group exposed 20 men and 20 women to erotic films in order to induce sexual arousal while subjecting the volunteers to MRI scans. Arousal was significantly higher in the men, although the brains of both sexes experienced activation in the amygdala, the right anterior temporal pole, and the hypothalamus. Thus the scientists concluded that sexual self-control involves activity in prefrontal regions and limbic structures. The study, along with others, reveals, according to Tancredi, “a complex interplay between steroid hormone actions that impact on specific regions of the brain”. The bad news for sex offenders, and even more so for their victims, is that individuals with high levels of testosterone suffer not only from greater sexual arousal than normal, but also a corresponding deficit in serotonin production, which is associated with poor impulse control.

The link between poor impulse control and brain states now appears firmly established. In a famous study done in the Netherlands in the early 1990s under the behavioural geneticist Professor Han Brunner, it was found that a group of men with criminal tendencies from childhood were suffering from a genetic defect that resulted in lowered serotonin. It is well known, moreover, that violent criminals have less grey matter in the prefrontal cortex. But as the “real Cracker”, the forensic psychologist Dr Julian Boon of Leicester University, says, “Some of my colleagues may well have such brain formations.”

What makes a person with a particular brain state or formation a psychopath and another a university professor is likely to remain imponderable. Psychopathology is not regarded under Britain’s Mental Health Act as treatable; hence psychopaths can only be held in prison after offending. Treatment for paedophiliac behaviour, also considered virtually intractable, exists in the form of castration to reduce testosterone. Surgical-castration studies on sex offenders have been conducted in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and Iceland, with reported reoffending rates down from 50% to below 5%. A study in Texas reported reoffending rates of about 2%, while a report in The New England Journal of Medicine has claimed that chemical castration is even more effective in reducing recidivism. The drug of choice is Depovera, trials of which show a recidivism rate of 15% with paedophiles. But the efficacy depends on the continuing compliance of the individual.

And so the debate rages on. The Decade of the Brain spawned a range of theories to provide deterministic explanations for human behaviour, but it also generated theories that contradict the kind of reductionism promoted by the likes of Crick and Dennett. The central issue is whether a neuroscientifically informed view of what it means to be human necessarily denies free will, and therefore any possibility of moral behaviour in the traditional sense of the term.

Neuroscientists like the Nobel prize-winner Gerald M Edelman insist that, without denying many deterministic factors in behaviour, including spontaneous acts, as described by Libet, we can argue for the authenticity of a measure of freedom based on our ability to make models of future scenarios. We envisage, imaginatively, acting in a certain way and the consequences of doing so, which implies, on the basis of common sense, that we are capable of choices. The example he likes to give is of a general who makes a variety of models for a coming battle, then chooses between them. The act of deliberation, allowing for many changes of mind, over a long period of time – it might take a month to plan a battle that takes three hours – reduces to absurdity the Libet notion that our brains decide before “we” act.

 

(continued final)

The British neuroscientist Professor Steven Rose, meanwhile, stresses the absence of a social and communitarian dimension in much neuroscientifically informed discussion of human autonomy. Rose consistently rejects the view, widely expounded by his colleagues, that “minds are nothing but the products of brains”.

A neuroscientist with a strongly philosophical and political cast of mind, he insists that we are freed as well as constrained by our “biosocial” nature, in other words by genes, environment and the constraints of the brain. Yet by the same token we as humans are radically undetermined. “Living as we do at the interface of multiple determinisms, we become free to construct our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.”

In other words, a more open view of the human condition, taking imagination and social realities into account, refuses to channel all behaviour and meaning of our lives through the brain. At the same time, it endorses the opinion of the Scottish moral philosopher David Hume, who argued more than two centuries ago that it is possible to be free as well as determined. A paedophile, he would insist, is predisposed to act as he does, in the sense that he has intense compulsions; but he has the ability, unless insane, to avoid situations in which he is tempted.

The dangers of reductionist neuroscience, when applied to society, are becoming increasingly apparent. At a time when the public perceives violence and criminality to be spiralling out of control, this view of responsibility could result in demands for the early identification and preventive detention of those whose brain biology is deemed to place them beyond treatment – as is the case with psychopaths and paedophiles. At the very least, Nikolas Rose of the LSE warns, there will be calls for early screening for a predisposition to “morally dysfunctional” behaviour early in childhood, involving mandatory tests and “diagnosis” in school and juvenile courts, followed by enforced pharmaceutical “treatment”. At the heart of the neuroscience of morality is a crisis that is already evident. In America there have been court cases involving parents who claim that they were ordered to medicate their children by school officials.

The philosophy that underpins this notion is based, as Francis Crick insisted, on the belief that our happiness and misery, our joys and sorrows, even our vices and virtues, are to be found not in the way we habitually live and work as members of families and communities, but exclusively in the state of our brain molecules.

If this viewpoint prevails, it follows that socially responsible solutions to our problems could be abandoned for enforced neuroscientific ones. As the philosopher Galen Strawson admirably puts it, “One is a moral agent only if one so conceives of oneself.” In other words, to be free, we must actually believe in our freedom.

A DISTURBED MIND

Can our brains really have such a powerful bearing on our actions? For the evidence, look at the science of brain tumours and lesions

The claim that our behaviour is linked to the composition of our brains is confirmed by the changes that often occur when somebody develops a brain tumour or lesion (as shown in the MRI brain scans on the left — the tumour is coloured green in the larger image, and the lesion is orange in the image below). As well as affecting functions of the brain such as memory, speech and movement, a tumour or lesion can trigger alarming changes in personality and behaviour. For example, a formerly reasonable person can become demanding and aggressive, and a previously focused, hard-working person can become lazy and distracted.

 

Note on the article just posted: it's not necessary to agree or disagree whether we are "hard-wired" to be bad, so much as it useful to note that origins of human behavior are both complex and fascinating.

What makes us do we what we do? How much is personal responsibility, how much is environment, how much is chemical? These are very hard questions to answer. The answers are not simple.

And that's precisely the problem with the sin meme. The sin meme is intensely simple, brutally so. It is a deliberately obtuse answer to a deeply complex phenomenon, on par with saying that cars and airplanes are endowed with the spirit of "go" rather than trying to understand how an engine works to create forward motion.

But of course the sin meme has to be deeply simple because a) it is thousands of years old and b) widespread acceptance of a concept means very simple people must be able to grasp it without effort.

Accepting such a simple answer as the concept of "sin" in place of the nuances and subtleties of real understanding, regardless of how daunting the complexity of the subject may be, seems a cop-out.

 

Goodness, Morality and the Ten Commandments


Throughout this book we have discussed the fact that God is imaginary. You have also seen that the Bible is a normal book written by normal people living thousands of years ago, and is therefore irrelevant to us today. It is an easy extrapolation of these two facts to realize the many implications. The most important implication is this: you have no soul, and there will be no "everlasting life" for you in heaven or hell. The typical human being living in the developed world has about 30,000 days to experience his or her existence, and that's it.

What do these simple truths actually mean for all of us as a society? How do we take advantage of this central reality and do something useful with it? These are important questions.

This may sound flippant to you initially, but here is one way to think about it -- what if we compare your 30,000 days here on earth to a trip to Disney World? It turns out that we can understand a great deal about life and our society as a whole by examining this analogy.

A trip to Disney World

Imagine that you were to plan a big family vacation to Disney World. You are going to take a week off of work, buy the plane tickets, reserve a hotel room and go. Most people would not travel all the way to Orlando, pay the price of admission into the Magic Kingdom and then fall asleep on a bench. Most people want to ride as many rides as possible. They want to see the entire park, watch the parade, eat the food, buy the souvenirs and get as much enjoyment as they can out of the experience. That is a completely valid way to look at Disney World, and it is also a completely valid way to look at your time here on earth. You want to get the most out of life.

Let's say that you did go to Disney World, paid your money to get in the gate, and then you discovered that there were gangs of teenagers running around robbing people, that there were people cutting into line at every ride, that many of the rides had been vandalized and did not work, and that there was litter everywhere. In other words, what if other people were totally ruining the place? You would be upset. You would complain to management. You would want your money back.

You realize several things as you think about your life in this way. For example, you can see why normal human beings do not want criminals running around in our society. During your 30,000 days on earth, you hear all sorts of stories in the news about:

Gangs of teenagers robbing people and selling drugs
Rapists attacking women and children
Murderers killing people in cold blood
Terrorists blowing up buildings and buses
Drunk drivers destroying the lives of innocent people
CEOs stealing millions of dollars from their businesses
Etc…
These out-of-control people ruin the experience for the rest of us. If they were running around doing this inside Disney World, management would exterminate them immediately. They simply would not be tolerated.
Your time here on earth is very precious, and you only get one chance to experience it. That is why human beings create laws, police departments and courts to deter the people who are spoiling the experience for everyone else. The vast majority of people are good, and they have no desire for bad people to wreck their lives.

The value of life

Once you realize that your life is limited and precious, you then extrapolate that onto others and begin to understand the value of their lives as well. This is something that happened in a significant way just after September 11, 2001 -- people in America were nicer to each other, more patient and more caring because each one of us realized how ephemeral and precious life is.

Once you eliminate the illusion of eternal life, the "spirit of September 11" is that much stronger and more important. We all have an extremely limited amount of time on earth to experience our lives. And we are all in this together. We should help each other to make the most of it.

This kind of thinking is where the concepts of "goodness" and "morality" start. The notion that "we are all in this together" is the beginning of everything good about human beings.

Understanding Goodness

Many religious people who read this book will try to use the following logic:

God must exist. A man cannot decide without God what is good and what is evil.
They believe that, without God, there can be no Ten Commandments. They would state that, without God, there can be no good or evil, and that any behavior is just as "good" as any other. That logic, of course, is silly. God quite clearly does not exist, yet people have been deciding what is good and what is evil for thousands of years.
Here is the simple reality: God is an imaginary being, just like Zeus, Allah, Vishnu and all the rest. The concept of Goodness, therefore, has nothing to do with God. Goodness comes from human beings. Goodness springs from the human intellect and common sense. By understanding this fact of life, we give Goodness even more power.

God may not exist, but the concept of God currently plays one very important role in our society. Right now, God is our proxy for Goodness. When we talk about God in many cases, we are talking about the idea of Goodness. We are affirming that Goodness and moral behavior are important parts of our society.

The problem with using a non-existent God as a proxy for Goodness is that it places Goodness somewhere "else" -- in an imaginary being called God -- when in fact Goodness is a human concept that emanates from human intelligence. Human beings create and implement Goodness, and we do it for good reason.

We need to understand the power and the value of human Goodness. Then, as a society, we need to eliminate evil, because evil has no place or value in any human civilization.

The source of Goodness

It is very easy to demonstrate to yourself where Goodness comes from, and why humans create it. We can start the demonstration with a question that everyone understands: Is murder good or evil? Forget about God and just answer the question using your own common sense. Murder: right or wrong?

Obviously murder is wrong. Everybody knows that. How do human beings all know that murder is wrong? We -- each one of us -- can look inside ourselves and ask, "Do I want to be murdered?" The answer is, "No." Of course not. It is obvious.

Ask 100 people, "Do you want to be murdered?" 100 people will all say, "No." A person cannot "exist" to answer the question unless he or she is "alive," so obviously he or she does not want to be "dead" because of a murderer. If everyone on the planet were running around murdering each other, humanity could not exist. It's as simple as that.

Occasionally, in perhaps one out of 1,000 people, you will find someone who says, "yes, I want to be murdered." That person is mentally ill and the other 999 of us can help him seek treatment. Life is the most precious thing that each of us possesses, and we understand that. Without life, we do not exist.

As you can see, each one of us understands that we do not want to be murdered. The next step is extrapolation. We extrapolate our personal understanding to everyone else. We realize that what we believe is universal. No one anywhere wants to be murdered. That is also obvious. It does not take a genius, or a god, to figure out that no normal human being wants to be murdered.

Through the extrapolation process, we realize something important: we are all in this together. By protecting your right to live your life free from the threat of murder, I protect myself as well. By working together to prevent murder for everyone, we each improve our own individual lives. So we can draw a conclusion that everyone can agree on. Murder is wrong. "Thou shalt not murder other human beings" is the commandment that we create to project this universal truth. We enforce this universal truth with the laws, police departments and courts that we have created to protect ourselves and each other.

It is interesting to note that "Thou shalt not murder other human beings" is not what the Bible says. The sixth commandment in the Bible is actually "Thou shalt not kill." If we were to take this as God's word, the commandment is much broader. When we eat meat, we are killing. When people sacrificed animals as God prescribed in the Old Testament, those animals were killed. Cutting down a tree for lumber kills the tree. In fact, spraying Lysol kills millions of germs on contact. God's actual commandment is nuts, and that is why no one follows it. Nonetheless, we all understand the universal truth that murder is evil.

As intelligent human beings, we can also understand that there are valid exceptions to the commandment. With our brains, we can see situations involving a "higher good" and reason it out. For example:

 

If someone attacks you and tries to kill you, it is OK for you to kill that person in self defense if necessary. We understand that, on a personal level, we have the right to defend our own lives. We understand it at the societal level as well. As a society, this is where the whole notion of the Department of Defense comes from. Note that we do not call it the Department of Offense. Also note that we generally recognize the Department of Defense to be our last resort.

If a person has been in a car wreck and is brain dead but still "alive", we can keep the person alive indefinitely with a ventilator and a feeding tube. Knowing that the person will never recover, however, we can decide that the higher good is to turn off the ventilator and donate the person's organs to other people who need them. Technically we have "murdered" the person and defied the Bible, but everyone understands that it is OK. Humans are smart enough to make distinctions like these.
Murder is an obvious and straightforward concept. It is easy to create the commandment, "Thou shalt not murder other human beings" and we can all agree that it is a universal truth. We can also agree that there are valid exceptions to the rule.
What about stealing? It works exactly the same way. You don't need an imaginary god to know that stealing is wrong. You simply ask yourself, "Do I want to have my stuff stolen from me?" No, obviously not. Therefore, by extrapolation, you cannot steal from other people because they don't want to be stolen from either. So stealing is wrong. "Thou shalt not steal."

Even when the Bible tells us something is OK, our brains can tell us objectively, and with moral authority, that it is wrong. For example, the Bible says that slavery is great. We discussed this problem extensively in chapter 13. The Bible clearly and unambiguously says things like this:

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. [Leviticus 25:44]
Do we allow slavery today? Of course not. Any human being can see that slavery is a moral abomination. We simply ask ourselves, "Would I like to be a slave?" The answer is "No." We extrapolate that obvious conclusion to others. Therefore, slavery is wrong. "Thou shalt not enslave others" should be a commandment. We all know that slavery is wrong, despite the fact that God condones slavery in the Bible. In the United States and other developed nations we override the Bible -- the error-free word of the Lord -- because we know that slavery is wrong. We override the Bible without hesitation. We do that so easily because human beings define Goodness, not an imaginary God.
We do not need an imaginary God to act as a moral authority. It is very simple for intelligent human beings to figure out right and wrong. We do it all the time. That is where our legal system comes from.

Creating our own commandments

You should now be able to see the power of what is happening here. Having proven that God is an imaginary being and that the Bible was written by primitive men, we are now free to discard the Bible. With it we discard the original Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments have performed a useful function in our society. They have acted as concise summary of our legal system. They have done that not because they were divinely ordained, but because most of them are common sense.

Now we are in the position to create our own commandments, designed to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We should do that as a nation. We should work to establish a set of new commandments that we all agree to live by. What we are creating is a set of the big-picture commandments that act as the concise summary of our legal system.

We should not abdicate something as important as the foundation of our legal system to a 2,000 year-old book written by a bunch of primitive goat herders. We should control the commandments ourselves as intelligent human beings. We should arrive at our commandments through a normal political process (public debate, voting, etc.). Doing this ourselves is an extremely powerful idea because we can all take part in the process, and we will actually get a much better set of commandments.

As intelligent human beings, what commandments might we create? Here is a starting point for the new commandments:

Do not murder or harm other human beings.
Do not enslave.
Do not steal.
Do not destroy another's property.
Do not lie or cheat.
Do not discriminate against groups of people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics. (We could add a list of specific group characteristics like sex, age, race, etc., but there is no need to. It is impossible to list all the groups.)
Do not waste the time of another, for our limited time on earth is all that we have.
Do not pollute the planet, for we all share it.
Obey the laws and ordinances of the community. If you do not agree with them, work to change them rather than disobeying them.
And so on...
Ninety nine percent of the people in this country can agree that murder is wrong, for the obvious reason that no one wants to be murdered. Ninety nine percent of the people in this country can agree that slavery is wrong, for the obvious reason that no one wants to be a slave. And so on. We create our commandments based on strong agreement like that, and we vote on the commandments to ratify them.
Why are these concepts important? Because they allow good people to live their lives in peace and happiness. When evil people who kill, enslave, steal, destroy, lie, cheat, etc. move into a society, they ruin it for everyone else. Therefore evil people should be eliminated so the rest of us can enjoy our precious time on this planet. The way we handle evil people today is with jails, prison and rehabilitation.

These common sense concepts already are the foundation of our legal system. For example, the common sense statement, "Do not murder or harm other human beings" is one foundation concept. From that foundation we derive thousands of specific legal concepts -- first degree murder, second degree murder, vehicular homicide, armed robbery, medical malpractice, product safety laws and so on. The broad statement "Do not murder" comes from common sense, and so do all of the specific laws we create. We are also smart enough to make exceptions for things like self-defense and brain-dead organ transplants.

We should establish the fundamental rules of conduct that we expect of everyone living in our society. We might have 20 broad "commandments" like those shown above. We should post our code of conduct in our courthouses, malls, schools, etc.

This process of creating the "20 rules of conduct" is not based on "religion" or "God." It is based on common sense. "Do not murder" is simple and obvious, and it is essential if we want to live in a functional society. We post these rules prominently to remind ourselves of our standards and our goals as a society.

We each have approximately 30,000 days that we get to spend on this earth. That's it. There is no reason why we should tolerate the 1% of people violate the rules of our society and who make things miserable for the other 99%. Every human being with common sense can agree on that, even though there is no god.

 

Why is anyone obligated to turn to God if He does not heal anybody?