I always get a kick out of it when I hear or read how a religious person asks an atheist why he doesn’t go around looting, pillaging, raping, killing and stealing, because, after all, without belief in God, or in the ten commandments, what’s there to keep him back?

I remember feeling insulted. Are things written in a book really the only thing that keeps religious people from being killers and rapists? I really hope not. Interestingly and incidentally, there are a lot of things written on those books, especially the Bible and the Quran, that drives people, yes, orders people to kill. Think the crusades. Think 9/11. Think the inquisition.

I have always prided myself of being moral. I don’t lie, steal, kill, rape, and torture. My morality does not depend on my belief in what’s written in any book. I just know what’s right or wrong. Or do I? Recently I was riding in a car to Los Angeles with a coworker, and we got to talking about Christian values.

We talked about this very subject, and he challenged me. He asked me where I got my moral compass? I wanted to say it had always been there, but I really didn’t know if that was true. Come to think of it, I probably got my moral values because I grew up in a world that is dominated by Judeo-Christian value systems, whether I like it or not. If I had grown up instead of in Europe in Papua New Guinea, as an Asmat, I might have been a headhunter, and my value system would have at its roots that if I kill and eat an enemy I absorb his powers and I bolster the power of my ancestors. To me, killing and eating another human being would be moral under those circumstances.

So it sure looks like I have to succumb to the idea that I am moral today, by our western standards, because I grew up surrounded by a Judeo-Christian culture. The argument in our conversation was that while Christianity is responsible for immense bloodshed and injustice over the millennia, it did do a lot of good.

Like feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and installing morality in me.