Why should anyone suppose that morality requires a religious basis either entails or is reducible to People must be restrained by fear of punishment or hope of reward [to be moral]?

I think the first proposition is true and the second false.

The question is not whether anyone will, in fact, be moral with or without religious belief. Plenty of people--Einstein included--display the virtues without harboring religious beliefs.

Rather, it is whether there would even be such a thing as objective morality if there were no God. As Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov asserts, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

In fact, I believe that the most defensible basis for morality is the notion of human dignity and a respect-for-persons ethic as articulated by Immanuel Kant and others. But it is hard to see why we should believe that individual members of this particular species enjoy anything like the Kantian notion of dignity if Bertrand Russell got it right:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins....

Why should the wildly contingent fact that collocations of atoms have formed into patterns that we call humans provide any ground whatsoever for thinking that those patterns are to be valued over any other "accidental collocations"?

In fact, Russell's contemporary George Santayana, a Harvard philosopher, argued Russell out of his moral realism on the grounds that his atheism left no room for it. Russell wound up maintaining that morality is subjective, "rather like one's fondness for oysters."

If Russell's subjectivism is correct, then the Einstein quote, which offers a moral evaluation, must be read as nothing more than an expression of Einstein's own subjective feelings: "I don't like it when people try to base their morality on religion." This might be of some biographical or psychological interest, but it, of course, says nothing whatsoever about whether people ought to seek religious foundations for moral beliefs.

it's Imago Dei or there is no reason that the "survival of the fittest" logic should not rule in moral matters.

This is the way to blog!

Yes, with the possible caveat that the evolutionist may be able to explain how altruism--a genuine others-centered concern--may have been adaptive and thus evolved. See, for instance, David Sloan Wilson and Elliot Sober, Unto Others.

One pair of evolutionary naturalists, Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg, argue that Darwinism implies moral nihilism, and, of course, since they embrace all of the premises, they embrace nihilism. But they go on to say that it is "nice nihilism." "Nice" in the sense that humans are hardwired to be social and benevolent and will continue to be so even if they understand rationally that there are no objective duties so to behave. Of course, to point out that Jones will refrain from pillaging, plundering, rifling and looting does nothing at all to assuage the implausibility of saying that none of these is actually wrong.

By the way, I want to write a best-selling thriller novel that I conceived long before the Dan Brown stuff. It's about this crazy cult that follows a guy who calls himself "Elijah" and thinks that he is the latter-day John the Baptist whose responsibility is to usher in the second coming of Christ. But he thinks that this is to be done through science and technology. The aim is to steal the Shroud of Turin, harvest DNA from the fibers, and attempt to clone Jesus. (There could be all sorts of twists: the DNA proves to be from a 14th-century peasant permitted to touch the shroud, or from a pigeon that invaded the chapel one day late in the 17th century....)

Don't you think "Imago Dei" is the perfect title?

And the book cover will have a cool image of the Shroud.

Now all I need is 400 pages of good stuff.

in this quote from Einstein. And one I'm in agreement with.

I haven't read the book, or article, on 'The God Gene', but I may have to delve into this more. There must be some logic in this premise, that we are either born with a God gene, and a need for religion in ones life, or we are not born with it, and , therefore, believe strongly that we make our own way in this life, with no help from the supernatural.

I must not have the god/God gene, although I do enjoy learning about the history of the great religions and their impact on the modern world.

Einstein believed that if l, m, n are the direction-cosines of the wave-normals of the light in a stationary system, no energy passed through the surface elements of a spherical surface moving with the velocity of light where:

(x-lct)(squared) + (y-mct)(squared) + (z-nct)(squared) = R(squared)

So that the surface permanently enclosed the same light complex relative to system k such that if the spherical surface was viewed as moving and thus was perceived to be an ellipsoidal surface, the equation for which, at any specific time X was:

(BE – lBEv/c)(squared) + (n-mBEv/c)(squared) + (Xi – nBEv/c)(squared) = also equaled R(squared)

(where B=the beta function and E=the epsilon function of course)

Obviously (to us now) this begs the question, “but what happens if the velocity of the ellipsoidal surface it is the same as the direction of the epsilon function?”

Granted this was 1905 before Maxwell but he could be wrong about your thing too, muddle.

And it is even more likely that he was wrong regarding "my thing." Einstein's weighing in on this philosophical issue is, in some ways, akin to my weighing in on the electrodynamics of moving bodies.

Gibson has a self tuning electric guitar now.

I yam what I yam....Popeye

I get the message. I'll change my avatar.
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Caution - The Surgeon General has determined that constant blogging is an addiction that can cause a sedentary life style.

Soooo, the new meds aren't working are they???
I'm sorry.

In the news on MSN this morning they are talking about going back to electric shock....that might work for you. Then you wouldn't have to worry about silly things like education and quenching your thirst for knowledge.

You might be right. I don't think Dr. Denise tried that one yet.
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Caution - The Surgeon General has determined that constant blogging is an addiction that can cause a sedentary life style.

That definitly sound like our little dollar doesn't it??

I love the rain we are getting today. Best part is no work, unless I answer the phone.

Ps: love the new avatar

Good morning back at ya!!!

My advice is, don't answer the phone.

It would be a good day to take a MS Flight Simulator virtual flight. I usually setup an IFR flight in and around the Southern California area. Funny, there used to be an airway intersection called "limbo". Me and my C120 would get hung there for traffic. I don't want to brag but, I was pretty good at "teardrop entries" with one radio. But hey, when you are only doing 90 knots it's not that hard.
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Caution - The Surgeon General has determined that constant blogging is an addiction that can cause a sedentary life style.

Wha?