Much of humanity is beguiled by the time-worn illusion that moral and ethical behavior cannot exist without a dose of religious faith. All evidence to the contrary is of little avail, and sometimes even skeptics fall into the trap. As far back as three hundred years ago, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a scholar-philosopher, succeeded in doing what such a large proportion of the human population has as yet failed to do. He dissociated religion and ethics. His books, particularly his rationalistic Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), stimulated the notables of the 18th- century Enlightenment. He was esteemed by luminaries such as Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, and across the Atlantic by our own Thomas Jefferson. Although eminent during his lifetime and for about eighty years thereafter, Pierre Bayle is now hardly familiar to the educated public. He had the hardihood, in the days of religious persecution, to maintain that the human being is too gross a slave to his passions for his conduct to be influenced by religion. In his opinion, a society of atheists would be no better or worse than a society of believers. He asked:
Bayle did make one exception. He thought that one to whom the holy spirit brings sanctifying grace is assured of eventually attaining a high ethical standard. In this instance, Bayle was conforming to his Calvinistic upbringing. Since the Calvinists believed that only a pitifully few receive sanctification, his argument was watertight in the practical sense. In our own time, we should go beyond Bayle. It seems to this writer that we should contend that the mental mechanism whereby we feel all too holy may lead to greater ill behavior then before one's state of sanctification. Illustrations from the past and present are ubiquitous. Calvin played the leading role in the judicial murder of Michael Servetus. He balmed his conscience by recommending that Servetus be hanged rather than burned at the stake. There were even more hardened souls in Geneva than Calvin. Servetus was burned at the stake. Calvin, moreover, was instrumental in the execution of some adulterers and even a few of his personal enemies. Martin Luther, in attempting to ingratiate himself with the German nobility, advocated a near-holocaust of the peasantry. The latter, in 1525, had revolted against the nobility in order to relieve themselves of a serfdom hardly rivaled in Europe. We need not dwell on the five hundred-year field day of the Catholic inquisitors from the 13th to the reputed 18th-century Enlightenment. All the evils just cited were perpetrated by the spiritually inspired. We may now examine our own age and country. Are the professedly religious in the United States less addicted to unethical behavior than the indifferent, the skeptical, the freethinker or the atheist? Reliable statistics are difficult to obtain. How ever, the media, not generally hostile to religion, indicate that believers in this country are as prone to unwholesome behavior as non-believers. Instances are numerous. Churchy businessmen were involved in the Savings and Loan scandal a few years ago. In 1994, a churchgoing lady from South Carolina drowned her two children and also maintained sexual relations with her father-in-law and a religious congressman. Religious fanatics within the last two years have murdered two physicians who had performed abortions. One may go on and on. These examples may be considered isolated lapses on part of believers, but the same may apply to the transgressions of non-believers. At least the latter are modest enough not to lather themselves with sanctity. Secular types emerge as definitely more ethical when we consider the factor of religious conflict. During the period of the crusades, the popes favored peace among West Europeans so that the latter should all the more effectually fight and slaughter Muslims. The popes goaded the knighthood of Europe to do the dirty, destructive work and meanwhile retained for themselves the halo of non-violence. The war in the former Yugoslavia, now seeming to end haltingly, has resulted in the sacrifice of more than 200,000 lives for the sake of religion. Should the war really end, it will happen as a result of fatigue rather than actual conversion from savagery to peace. The ideological wars of the 20th century have only been outwardly non-religious. The participants, communists, Nazis, fascists, etc., all preserved a veneer of secularity while indulging in the same fervid, dogmatic bellicosity as previous generations of religious fanatics. It should be recalled that Hitler himself respected the catholic religion into which he was born, especially the persecuting Jesuits of the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that the allegedly secular ideologues of this century have been trying to fulfill the hopes of their religious predecessors.
The respective ethical orientations of believers and nonbelievers are poles apart. Non-believers tend to accept sense impressions or empirical data, tend to base their moral decisions on the stream of evidence provided by the external world. They respect the external world as really distinct from themselves. They are not encumbered by that hazy indefiniteness called spirituality, upon which religion is dependent. Some claim that religion is not the same as spirituality. It appears, however, that religion is spirituality collectively manifested, as when groups share common spiritual beliefs. Believers find no satisfaction in deriving ethical behavior from the external world, a world replete with uncertainty. They consequently bury themselves in spiritual emotion, shrinking from the idea that spirituality and morality are opposites. They pluck morality from its source in experience and transplant it into dubious subordination to the spiritual. They become slaves to the unending a priori litany caused by avoidance of things outside the skin, clinging to unproven notions like the Supreme Being or the immortality of the soul. Why are they so enmeshed? Enthrallment to ego, immoral in itself, seems to be the answer. Examples are legion. The fundamentalist raises his dignity by asserting a god-endowed superiority over animals. The fact of human evolution from a primate ancestor especially offends him. Descartes, one of the most acclaimed of philosophers, virtually denied that animals are even conscious. Did he fear that consciousness in animals would imply immortality of the soul in animals as well as in humans? What a petty, execrable preoccupation, feeling superior to animals and finding religious or spiritual justification for the feeling.
Ascetics are often encouraged and supported by non-ascetics. The latter are consciously or subconsciously aware of their own transient sexual condition and consequently empathize with bona fide ascetics. Further, religion condones the sexual ego in the matter of undue sexual monopolization. Some sense of proprietorship over one's husband or wife is inevitable and may even be proper. It becomes inordinate, however, when women must wear veils to satisfy the monopolizing pretensions of fundamentalist males in some foreign countries. The very orthodox Jewish women have their hair cropped at marriage and forever after wear wigs. A custom such as this tickles the male ego, but at a price. He may be sacrificing wifely attractiveness for fear of sexual competition. Another mechanism of the religiously driven ego is the cult of virginity. This writer concedes that it may be practical for adolescents to abstain from sexual activity until later in life. Some parents, however, spoil a good thing when they reveal in ways obvious to their progeny that they are sexually jealous of them. Such parents do not favor virginity for the sake of their issue but for the sake of their own sexual ego. They are in sexual competition with their children. Speaking of competition, the envy of the superior accomplishments of another may find compensation in the belief that the spiritual soul transcends the petty, material doings of mankind. The soul, divorced from the activities that make us jealous of each other, is an equalizing consolation to Mr. Average Man. I do not contend that only nonbelievers are envious but that they have a greater chance of evading envy. It is tedious to pile example upon example. What emerges is that the believer's ego does not derive enough pride, self-esteem and consolation from the outwardly gazing, situational approach to ethics. It is ironical that believers make pride a prime attribute of the nonbeliever. Yet pride, the sin of Adam and Eve according to St. Augustine, is one of the essential traits of the religious temperament. The pride stemming from a sense of palpable accomplishment is minuscule in comparison with spiritual pride. What has been said above is only a modest extension of the thought of the scarcely known Pierre Bayle. In denying that the morality of the religiously minded is any higher than that of freethinkers and atheists, he provided a springboard whereby others have been able to go forward and repudiate any inherent morality in religion. For this, we owe many thanks to Bayle and to other near-forgotten or actually forgotten heroes of thought.
2. Middle life, not so long ago, began at about the age of 30.
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