Everything is permissable

I was listening to a dramatisation of The Brothers Karamazov whilst on a long drive from north to south. It was the second time I had listened to this great work of literature and, as can happen quite often, I was struck by something Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had to say that I didn't pay much attention to. He is in dialogue with his brother Alyosha, the younger brother in 'training' to become a monk. Ivan is a writer who seems fully comfortable with the assertions of the Enlightenment writing some articles that offend the Orthodox Church, so there is somewhat of a backdrop creating uneasiness between these two estranged brothers who have been flung together because of a family crisis. Ivan reminds Alyosha that everything is permissible, a variation of 1 Corinthians 6:12 where Paul writes of sexual immorality, and asserts that if he does not accept God then he is able to do what he wills and not God. If you do not believe in God then you have no moral imperative, no need to do anything other than that which gratifies oneself. Indeed, without a moral compass fashioned from faith in God then how can anything one does be wrong?

The population of the world is somewhere in excess of 7.6 billion, of which there are 1.3 billion muslims, 2.1 billion Christians, 900 million Hindu's, 23 million Sikh's, 14.4 million Jews, covering roughly 70% if the world population. So whether your god is the somewhat terrifying god of the Muslims, the belligerent gods of the Hindu's, the precise god of the Jews, or the compassionate god of the Christians, then you have a moral compass and if you are an adherent of your faith's teaching then you have something to guide you through the difficult decisions that one has to make in life. But what about the rest of humanity?

Some 1.1 billion individuals (some 15% of the population) consider themselves either secular, atheist or agnostic. They have no god (so they say) so where does there moral compass come from? They will no doubt lay claim to the fact that they have a conscience, so where does this come from? Is it possible that humanity, unique amongst the animal kingdom, has a conscience derived from the mix of chemicals that make up our bodies? Or is it the hard work of their parents (nature or nurture) that enable them to distinguish between right and wrong? In most cases where does that right or wrong come from originally? Well in the tradition of the monotheistic religions this comes originally from their scripture: in the west the basis of all our laws is the moral and ethical teaching of the Holy Bible, in Islam it is the Koran, in Judaism it is the Torah. So, as an atheist I set my own moral compass based upon teachings that originally came from one of these great tomes. But as an atheist surely I reject all such teaching and by doing so reset my moral compass to one that says "Everything is permissible" which is what Ivan, guided incidentally by visions of the devil, asserts to his pious brother Alyosha, fully accepting there is a God, but choosing not to follow him all the same.

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