Having just read this bit on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's raving about the necessity of religion, I'm reminded again of how god belief has such a successful track record of tagging along as a third wheel, and by successful I mean fooling people into thinking it's anything but a third wheel. Certainly here in the US, it's successfully joined itself at the hip with patriotism that most can't distinguish them to the point where they incorrectly identify efforts to expunge the parasite as an attack on the host.

Blair makes claims about the importance of the role of religion, specifically the Catholic church, in the development of nations and argues for it's voice to be heard in the public square, saying, "it is extremely important that this religious aspect exists; it is not a coincidence that the Pope writes that humanism without God is inhumane." Now replace all of his uses of faith, religion, the church, and even god with morality, and suddenly none of it seems very objectionable, does it? Who would argue against the importance of the role of morality in the development of nations? Who thinks morals should be ignored when deciding how to use technology, or for making policy? Who really is going to object to moral arguments in the public square? Who says there can be humanism without morals? I'm thinking very few.

As many have been tricked into thinking god belief and patriotism are one and the same, so too most have been convinced god belief and morality are one in the same. They most certainly are not. True, most religions use god belief to force compliance to their moral system, but a good deal of their moral codes don't require a supernatural incentive (neither a positive one nor a negative one). Such things as murder, rape, and enslavement don't require god belief to learn or infer that they're inhumane acts. In fact, god belief may well impede or block altogether any real understanding of how these acts are atrocious, allowing only an understanding to value other human life under orders to do so.

Nearly every atheist has heard the question from the religious, "if you don't believe in god, then what's stopping you from just killing people?" The frightening thought is that god belief apparently is the only thing keeping someone who asks such a question from perhaps killing you or me. Certainly for such a person, any attempt to remove religious impositions such as a manger at City Hall in December is seen as an attempt to remove morality, and with such a misguided belief, it's then easy to convince them that social and economic ills are a result of this removal of morality.

Indeed, last year there was a great deal of outrage over the depravity of Wall Street, to which religious leaders capitalized on the tragedies as justification for a new infusion of religion into Wall Street. The same idea is seen in prison, where again these lost, depraved people need to find god. Well in all those cases I doubt if any of us would disagree that an infusion of morality would be good, but how does convincing such people to accept an irrational belief going to make matters better? God belief is not morality, and that's something the religious have to learn and we non-religious have to learn about the religious. Consider again what I said above about replacing Blair's religious words with "morality". It's important to realize how, if you do so, we probably would be in agreement often with the religious, but yet how such a failure to see that god belief and morality aren't the same thing leads them to react so vehemently and, to us, so irrationally whenever there's a move to shed religious impositions into public life.

A bit of empathy is needed on our parts if we're going to not only understand morality ourselves, but help them realize what it is, and what it certainly is not.