Connection to "The God Fuse"

I came across a web article today called "The God Fuse: Ten Things Christians and Atheists Can - and Must - Agree On" by David Wong and it seems to relate to our discussion in class today about the movie Red. I highly recommend reading this article--it's both insightful and entertaining. As the title of the article indicates, Wong discusses where Christians and Atheists have common ground, and one of the biggest issues is morality. We ended our class discussion today on the point that religion can be viewed as one way to strengthen the connections between people that seem to be at the core of human life and that there are other, secular, ways to do the same thing. With religion, God is at the center of human relationships, but without religion, people can still seek to recognize and nurture their relationships with other people. Likewise, in the Wong article, religion is one way to approach morality--and atheism is another.

Wong emphasizes that regardless of one's religion, everyone feels the same moral "baseline," namely, "the value of human life." In addition, this moral has no proof or logical reason for existing: "[T]here's this invisible rule that [is] supposed to be followed, that everybody [is] supposed to be aware of, that can't be proven by logic. Whatever it is, wherever you think it came from, you can't deny that it's there. Your own behavior would make you a liar." Whether atheist or Christian--or anything else--everyone has the same moral conscience to respect human life. This tendency is innate (except in psychopaths...), so it's not intrinsically part of religion; instead, religion arises out of it (or, at least, that's one interpretation). Wong states that "at the very worst, the Christians are just taking that same moral impulse and applying it to the God question.... If they're wrong about God, they're only wrong in that they've taken that absolute morality and put a face on it, made an idol out of it. Taken it one step too far." According to Wong, the morality is there whether or not God has been added to it. This is like our discussion of Red in which the characters clearly seek love and connection with their fellow human beings without having any metaphysical reasons for doing so. The baseline fraternity instinct, if you will, is there despite the lack of religion.

To try to keep this post a reasonable length, I won't elaborate on the many other intruiging aspects of this article (although I might do that in my essay), but I again urge you all to read the article itself.