Ciro Galli

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not—that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral—that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts

[O]ur evolved brains have become hyper-social filters, such that our theory of mind is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, to categories that haven't any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched by inert gas... ...As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the weight of selective importance placed on our theory-of-mind skills, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the psychological states we perceive. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving--or misbehaving--people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down, "untrustworthy" vehicles in the sides and have verbally abused our "incompetent" computers. Bering, Jesse (2011) "The Belief Insti