(Religion just saw a opportunity…to control others and make money from re-packaging, branding, and perverting morality…distorting it for its own benefit and self-aggrandizment…polluting it with blatant immorality, including slavery and genocide, rape and pillage, never ending war and expansionist conquest, oppression of minorities, genital mutilation…and all kinds of abuse…)
"We are a highly social species, using social structures like monogamy, family, clan, and tribe. Our ancestors were using these structures at least 500,000 years ago.
Cultural anthropologists have long recognized how all human societies have similar basic norms of moral conduct. Marc Hauser, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, has published a paper about additional studies showing that people’s moral intuitions do not vary much across different religions all around the world. From an evolutionary perspective, that means that human morality is very old — old enough to pre-date any religion that exists today. Furthermore, basic morality is highly resistant to religious influence — most people easily reject religious rules that violate their basic moral intuitions. Rather, religions all tend to confirm and support human morality, because that essential morality sustains our schemes of social cooperation.
The rich diversity of supernatural fantasies hides their common function: to enhance willing obedience. Religion did not evolve independently from, or earlier than, our moral capacities. Morality is independent from religion, while religion is dependent on human morality. And that’s a good thing.”
Also:
The earliest legal codes — which specifically described behaviors to be encouraged-discouraged in the form of do’s and don’ts, pre-date the rise of the oldest world religions.
While the Ten Commandments (Jewish) and the maxims of the Rig Veda (Hindu) are respectably old, both dating from around 1,500 BC, the Sumerians had a legal code (which addressed moral and ethical issues) more than a thousand years earlier. The Sumerian code makes no reference to religion and is not based on religion. By the same token, the Babylonian King Hammurabi formulated his famous law code (based on moral and ethical behavior) hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments or Rig Veda were conceived or written. Hammurabi’s code was neither based on nor grounded in religion.
There is, therefore, no historical evidence to support the idea that moral and ethical precepts originate with — or are dependent on — religion. The conflation of morality with religion is a relatively recent development in human history, and it is limited to certain peoples in certain places who practice certain religions.
All this aside, there already is a substantial body of scientific research which demonstrates that moral and prosocial behavior has a long evolutionary history and that such behavior is biologically rooted. Some primates, untutored children, and adults in all cultures appear to possess basic concepts of altruism, cooperation, fairness, sharing, and tend to treat others in a manner that could easily be described as “the golden rule.” Primates and humans are intensely social, so these findings should come as no surprise.
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