The Major Fear Of The Religious

If one listens carefully to the complaints of the religious about the direction society is taking, one finds a fear that they are losing the battle to dictate morality (link). Following are sample quotes from an article in The Guardian entitled, "Humanism and morality have cast off religion", that highlight the futility of their efforts:

"Is it so hard to see that humans have values whether they believe in the supernatural or not? That the ideas at the heart of liberal faith – love, compassion and human rights – are ones humanity has developed in the same way humanity developed ideas of God. If we created it all, and we and our ideas evolve, then why shouldn’t we choose to keep the important stuff and discard the packaging?

"There is a philosophy which has grown up within and alongside religion from the beginning and that is humanism. Come on in: you will find humanists full of wonder, full of spirituality, if by that you mean a sense of connectivity with things greater than themselves, and morally engaged with the world." ~Hester Brown

"The assertion that human rights 'arose out of Christianity' is unsustainable. Human rights were variously encoded long before Christianity and beyond Europe, for example, by Babylonian King Hammurabi 2,000 years before, and in the 6th century BCE by the Charter of Cyrus. Around the same time in China, Confucius urged respect for the intrinsic value and moral force of all people and articulated the Golden Rule. In the 4th century BCE, the Confucian Mencius declared that 'the individual is of infinite value, institutions and conventions come next, and the person of the ruler is of least significance'. Christianity added only dogma, guilt, and hellfire to Judaism’s version of the Golden Rule (Leviticus 19:34), and bound human worth to God and the church. Human beings have struggled for human rights for as long as they have existed and in all parts of the planet: perhaps we should just have more faith in ourselves?" ~Peter McKenna