Manichaeism was a religion which had communicants from Spain to China. It has disappeared from the earth. Nobody identifies with that religion any more. Nobody worships Zeus or Mithra any more. Humans invent a religion, and it may last a long time after it is invented. Eventually it disappears. The same thing can happen to Christianity and probably will. Then other humans will invent a new religion. So it goes.

Maybe humans will lose their need for supernatural mumbojumbo. Probably not.

Christianity has lasted this long, through worse challenges then are going on today. It won't disappear. Not because it's man made but resilient (as is thought by some). But because it's from God and the world is powerless to remove what God has put in place.

The Church exists today only because over centuries people have been indoctrinated at birth and never thought to question the existence of God. With education and the development of rational, reasoned thought the Church's mythology has, for many, ceased to be relevant and has been abandoned. The election of conservative Popes and bishops in the Catholic church and its hidebound refusal to move with the times should hasten its decline and eventual demise.

Any moral authority the Churches ever had has been swept away by the recent child molestation scandals and their clumsy attempts to protect the Church's image at all costs.

A very thoughtful, interesting article.

People often say that when a supernatural basis for morality goes, so will morality. "Without God, all things are possible," as one writer put it.

The argument here is that there is no objective, maximizing-your-self-interest reason to behave in a moral fashion, if you can escape detection when behaving in an immoral fashion: if there is no invisible man in the sky watching you, and preparing your punishment in an after-life, why not do as you please, so long as you don't get caught?

Most of us have a 'conscience' which makes us feel bad when we contemplate doing evil, although this conscience seems to be very malleable, especially when the interests of your tribe are concerned.

A rational person who is an atheist will understand, in theory at least, that his 'conscience' is just the sum total of the things he was taught, by parents and society, while growing up, or behavior programmed by evolution. (The attempt to find human universals for morality, presumably the result of evolutionary selection, has found a few, but they seem to be weak. And of course there is the problem if sociopaths.)

I don't think there is an answer to this. So if you don't believe in an invisible man in the sky, you'll just have to work hard to make sure that evildoers get caught frequently enough so that we internalize the simple rule, don't do evil, where evil is some variant of the Golden Rule.

Will this work? We'll find out.

There was no supernatural basis for morality in most of the classical world. People worshipped the gods to court their favour. Gods were much like humans with the faults and virtues of humans. Yet people were generally moral and behaved decently. Philosophy and community standards determined their morality not the gods. The Abrahamic religions connected morality with belief in a divinity. It doesn't have to be that way. Morality developed as a way to behave in society. The Abrahamic religions connected morality and belief in a supernatural. They need not be connected.

Yes, I agree with this. Also relevant is that my atheist and agnostic friends don't seem to behave any worse than my Christian friends. And the latter don't really seem to act well, when they do, because God told them to ... rather, they're responding to something internal, plus perhaps wanting to receive the social approval that accompanies good deeds and avoid the disapproval that accompanies bad deeds.

People who raise the "Without God, everything is possible" argument point out that we have no rational basis for always doing good. I cannot tell a child [an improbably intelligent one!], "Don't steal ... even if you are never caught, you shouldn't steal", if he answers me, "Why not? If I will never be caught, and I don't happen to have your internalized non-rational aversion to stealing ... why shouldn't I?" -- in that case, I cannot answer him. [I might, however, want to see if they've raised the time limit for abortion. I think we call people like this sociopaths. Presumably, this disorder has a genetic origin, which means we'll be controlling, i.e. extinguishing, it, given a few more generations of scientific progress.]