"Morality is Not Obedience"

Our good friend Blue Girl has a standard retort to freakazoids who claim that without religion, we have no morals:

"If religion is the only thing preventing you from stealing and raping and murdering, I don't want to be around when you have a crisis of faith."

PZ Myers elaborates:

It's a strange world Arvin thinks we should be living in — one where, if they aren't controlled by a magic slave-owner in the sky, we'd wander about killing and raping. I wonder about people like Arvin. Why don't they ever imagine that, if we abandoned biblical authority, we might wander the earth drinking beer occasionally, watching TV, and working hard at our jobs so we can afford that vacation to Disneyworld? You know, the kind of stuff most people do right now.

The short answer to Arvin's goofy but all-too-common question is this: morality is not obedience. Morality derives from empathy and a sense of communal obligation with our fellow human beings, not with an arbitrary and whimsical supernatural authority. Destroy god, and people still live…so nothing would change for me.

Arvin, on the other hand, would be going on a rampage with a yardstick, losing sight of the fact that other people are something more than meat of a certain height and sex, raping and killing. Arvin really ought to see a psychiatrist. He's an emotionally and intellectually stunted individual.

Read the whole thing.