Morality without religion?

Sam Harris and Stephen Fry themselves would have to admit that the biggest practical result of the general success of atheism (or at least non-theism) against traditional religion in the modern world isn’t the dawning of some utopian rationalist paradise, it’s that they now have to spend a surprising amount of time fighting the rising tide of a postmodern atheistic religion.

Religion is the architecture of value. All humans have an architecture of value, therefore all humans have religion. You can have a morality without a formalized, developed, or coherent religion. But you will still have a religion.

Or a parody or perversion of one. A Frankenstein monster of bits cobbled together and animated by human need and passion and ingenuity. Possibly some monstrosity of pagan design. All head and no hands, or all hands but no heart. Fractured elements of a greater design swollen to godlike proportions. A cult instead of a pantheon. An idol instead of a God. An ideological cutting from the tree of religion.

Religion is simply what we call a well-developed architecture of value at the scale of human complexity and enterprise. What I mean is that it has extended itself into the many various areas of human value and action, as well as the various domains of human creative expression, and developed algorithms or rituals related to daily human life and the life of the society.

So if you’re human, you’re going to have a religion. It’s just a question of how formalized, how developed, how extended, what algorithms, what values, what actions, how much has it been tested rationally and empirically across time, etc etc. Religion, but to what degree of development and integration and extension? And how aware of it and in what way do you follow it and how engaged with that whole process are you?

Humans don’t impose religion on some preexisting underlying moral structure, that it takes over and sits on top of and could be removed from, like scraping butter off of bread. The religion is the moral structure. The degree to which we recognize a system of value as a religion is much the same way we recognize all products of human development. There is in a single cell the nature and structure, the guiding code, of the whole developed organism, a human being. But it is only as that single cell is extended and develops and produces all the mechanisms, both physically and intellectually, that allow it to engage with the world in the many ways that we can, that we start to recognize it for what it is.

When we see the limbs and the face particularly, we can say, aha, it’s a person. Or that it’s a child on the way to becoming the fully-developed fulfillment of that promise. And it takes a long time for that cell to become a fully capable adult human, able to do and think and be all the things we can be, able to reproduce itself. And we do that reproduction, again, with a single cell containing one unique genetic code.

The nature is constant, the nature is implicit; but it is not complete, it is not embodied, it is not what it is in its nature to be, unless it is also explicit. You couldn’t take the body and mind away from the DNA and expect it to somehow survive or be a functioning human on its own. The human body isn’t a mere epiphenomenon of human DNA. And that code, that nature, that DNA, is implicit and unremovable from the cells of the body. It contains them. But the body is more than the mere vessel that carries the DNA. It is the embodiment of it. And that is also why a living and active morality and a living and active religion are fundamentally inextricable.

Morality and value are the DNA that the body of religion expresses.