Religion Rises Above In-Group Morality

Re “The Divinity of Politics,” Commentary, Feb. 5: Michael Shermer’s claim that religion is used to reinforce the unity of the in-group -- all the way up to nations -- is, of course, true. His answer is to substitute science and democracy for religion, and progress will be made.

Do science and its stepchild, technology, have a better track record than religion? Is science and state a better combination than church and state? Is the proposal to send a man to Mars science or nationalism?

His biblical example is that “love thy neighbor” is only for the in-group. That is where love surely has to start.

Consider another biblical example: Jesus’ story of the Samaritan who helped the fallen man while two religious persons bypassed him because he wasn’t a neighbor.

The story concludes with the question, “Who proved to be a neighbor?” That is very different from the in-group morality described by Shermer. That seems to be a clearer answer than science and democracy can give.

Ken Savage

Palm Desert

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Shermer’s opinion of President Bush and his invocations of God makes interesting reading, as he remarks on “political leaders throughout history [who] have linked themselves to the divine.”

I suggest that Shermer devote at least a little attention to the accomplishments of political leaders who have linked themselves to the negation of the divine: Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceausescu, Enver Hoxha.

These and many more like them made the economic welfare of the common man their goal. Religion for them was the opiate of the people. Since 1917, and in the pursuit of their atheistic utopias, they have caused the deaths of 100 million human beings. There is a lesson to be learned, whether Shermer can see it or not.

Manuel H. Rodriguez

Burbank

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Shermer offers a quasi-Darwinian account of human morality. He wants to learn, he says, “from what science tells us.” Yet his effort, which presupposes that only the scientific method is able to plumb very far into the mysteries of the human spirit, is not itself science. It is grounded in a theory about science, about the range of its competence. It is scientism -- just as subject to critical examination as Bush’s theology.

In any case, perhaps Shermer will forgive some of us for finding the Hebraic, Socratic/Platonic, Kantian, Kierkegaardian, Gandhian or even Nietzschean or Camusian accounts of the human moral sense far more intellectually compelling.

At least none of them imagined that one can pull a rabbit out of a hat -- that is, derive a moral ought from self-interest, however “evolved.”

Stanley R. Moore

Claremont