The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Hey, kids! I’ve decided to cancel today’s regularly scheduled lesson and take you all on a little field trip instead. No permission slips required, feel free to stick your arms and legs out the windows all you want, just please remember (as always) to keep an open mind.

Our destination is the Land of Morality. It’s a big, old Land, and we won’t have time to do more than glimpse a few parts of it today, but I hope you enjoy what you see. 

The first thing that we notice as we arrive is that only a very small part of Morality is built upon the Bible.

Consider:

—– Most of the people on earth today are neither Jews nor Christian and yet they seem to be managing to live lives more or less as moral as those of Jews and Christians.

—– The vast majority of people who have ever lived never heard of the Bible, yet somehow they, too, seem to have lived lives not that much different from those who have heard of the Bible.

If you have a camera with you, you might want to take a moment now to get a shot of those Hindus over there, peacefully going about their daily tasks while believing in a religion which predates Christianity by thousands of years. Many visitors also enjoy taking a few snapshots of highly ethical Japanese Shintoists, Chinese Taoists, and Thai Buddhists. Sunnis, Shiites, Jains, Parsees, Sikhs, Confucianists, and other ethical non-Christians abound for those of you who brought extra film. Those with special history-sensitive film might want to concentrate on pre-Columbian American Indians such as the Pueblo and Iroquois, or the many other indigenous people around the world who have managed to build peaceful, functional communities without ever having heard of Moses or Jesus.

A bit overwhelmed by all your choices? Let me suggest that you focus on the ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who struggled with moral questions and came up with some fairly good answers despite the fact that none of them had either Old or New Testaments to guide them. Indeed, many subsequent Christians were impressed enough by their thinking to make much of it their own.

Moving on through the Land of Morality, we notice another startling feature of the terrain: Much of it is occupied by avowed atheists! Indeed, there are so many highly moral atheists here that I cannot begin to list them all. Instead, here are two extensive web sites that will give you some sense of just how many we’re talking about.

For famous atheists of the past, check out this URL:

http://www.wonderfulatheistsofcfl.org/Quotes.htm

For a list of famous atheists alive today, check out this URL:

http://www.celebatheists.com/

Are all these atheists equally “moral” (however you care to define the term)? I don’t think so. But few can be legitimately described as immoral, and what ethical variation as may exist exists not because they are atheists but because they are individuals first and part of a group second. The remarkable thing is that so many obviously moral atheists exist at all given that so many people seem to believe that it’s impossible for non-theists to recognize right from wrong.

Moving on, we see that the Land of Morality is even bigger than this.

Anthropologist Richard Leakey and others have spent their lives studying primitive prehistoric people and their predecessors. Such study reveals functioning human tribes and societies made possible by “family values” and cooperation that obviously could not have been inspired by the Bible.

Others, like Jane Goodall, have studied our close relatives, chimps and apes. They, too, reveal mostly peaceful, functioning groups of individuals – not crazed creatures going on murderous rampages because they lack the guidance of a Bible. Indeed, many if not all of the animals I encounter in nature every day are living “moral” lives marked by devotion to offspring, hard work, and no more violence than is required for self-preservation. Although some might say this is because God instilled in these animals the instinctual “morality” they need to survive, I think that the evidence and a bit of thought reveal it far more likely that their behavior evolved over time and is what it is today because it works.

As we end this brief excursion through the Land of Morality, I hope this is the souvenir you take away with you: “Morality exists because it works.”

Moral people and societies tend to survive and thrive. Immoral people and societies tend to perish. Not because God wills it but because good behavior brings with it definite rewards while bad behavior brings with it definite punishments. There may be a time gap between an action and a result, and sometimes good might be punished while bad is rewarded, but by and large the basic behavior we call “moral” is the behavior which works best.

Consider tolerance. A theist might say tolerance is good because God mandates it, period. An atheist might say tolerance is good because it works in practice. Instead of claiming to know the mind of God, an atheist might say, “Look at history and compare cities which were crossroads where many cultures freely mingled (like ancient Ephesus) with those cities where foreigners and those who were ‘different’ were kept out. Is it a coincidence that Ephesus was the birthplace of Western philosophy while other cities stagnated? Is it a coincidence that open, tolerant cities and societies prosper while closed, intolerant cities and societies are bad for people and business alike and tend to wither away?”

Consider Hitler. A theist might say he was bad because he killed people and the Bible says “Thou shalt not kill.” An atheist might say Hitler was bad because he was crazy and stupid. His oppressive Nazism drove Germany’s best minds to America. Many people in the Soviet Union at first greeted his troops as liberators from Communism – but his hatred and oppression of them inspired a vehement resistance movement. He might have mobilized all his country’s resources to fight and win World War II. Instead, he counterproductively persecuted millions who in other circumstances might have supported him, and he made sure the trains were kept running to the death camps even as Allied forces were closing in and those trains could have been put to much better use, to say the least. In the end, both theists and atheists can agree that what Hitler did was monstrously wrong. Belief in God is rather beside the point as many who believed in God supported Hitler and many if not all atheists can vehemently condemn his behavior on independent moral grounds.

And yet many seem to think that to be an atheist means to be amoral or immoral. Many seem to think that without God or the Bible, it’s an “anything goes” kind of world.

Indeed, I often get the impression that people are theists not so much because they believe in God or the Bible but because they’re afraid that the alternative to believing in God and the Bible is a black pit of all against all, of unrestrained immorality, and of total chaos.

I hope this little tour of the Land of Morality has set their minds at ease. I hope they have also begun to realize that atheism – when coupled with logic and science – is not merely an attack on theism but a positive life view and moral force of its own.

“What about Columbine?” I can hear someone ask as we arrive back home and he steps down from the bus. “Weren’t Harris and Klebold atheists?”

Really, I don’t know what they were. I’m not sure anybody does. Atheists or theists, what they did was wrong and indefensible. Their atheism or theism was trumped by their madness – much like the countless number of self-described theists I’ve read about in the paper who claim they clubbed their baby to death because God told them to, or they killed their wife so she could be with Jesus. I don’t point to these obviously insane people and say, “Well, this never would have happened had they been atheists!” Please don’t assume Harris and Klebold’s madness could have been prevented or cured by theism if they did, in fact, reject it in the first place.

“But how can atheists ever believe murder is bad if God or the Bible doesn’t tell them that it is?”

As luck would have it, I recently answered just this question in Goodnight Elisabeth’s journal. Here are the 7 reasons I posted there:

1. Murder someone and chances are greatly increased someone will murder you or yours.
2. Murdering someone deprives you of their services, their experience, their wisdom, their second set of eyes, their ability to contribute to the gene pool – lots of things.
3. A society which tolerates murder greatly increases stress levels, the need for deadbolts and guns, and lots of other things that end up outweighing whatever benefit murder brings people.
4. Murder increases the sum total of pain in the world. It usually hurts the murdered. It almost always hurts the murdered’s friends & relatives. Pain is bad. So, murder is bad.
5. Increasing the world’s total sum of joy is good. Murder pre-empts the murdered’s future joy and the joy he or she can bring to others. Therefore, murder is bad. 
6. We can never be sure of the consequences of our actions. It is best to limit and control them as best we can. Murder can lead to vast, unintended consequences. Better to find other ways of solving disagreements.
7. Murder is irreversible. It’s better for us if we avoid as many irreversible actions as we can.

Yes, it’s possible to argue with each of these points – but one can obviously argue with the claim that the Bible is a reliable moral guide, too. The point to remember is that rejecting the Bible does NOT automatically deprive you of the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong.

I would even argue that reason-based morality is better and far more likely to merit our support than a morality based on “My God says so!”

Just as I would argue that parents who explain right and wrong to their kids are far more likely to be respected and obeyed than parents who resort to smacks and “Because I say so!” to control the behavior of their offspring. 

But enough about me. Now that we’ve taken this little field trip to the Land of Morality together, what do you think?