I found the essay "If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?" in the book "The Portable Atheist", compiled and edited by Christopher Hitchens. Dr. Anderson is a professor at the University of Michigan.
Per Dr. Anderson's homepage: "I am Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies. I teach courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, and feminist theory. Within these fields, my research has focused on democratic theory, equality in political philosophy and American law, racial integration, the ethical limits of markets, theories of value and rational choice (alternatives to consequentialism and economic theories of rational choice), the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science."
Here follows her synopsis of this article (yes, I would love to post the whole article but you might tire before reading it all, and it truly deserves to be read in its entirity):
"Many people object to atheism because they believe that if there is no God, then morality lacks authority. The worry is that "if God is dead, then everything is permitted." We know that not everything is permitted--and in particular, that practices such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, torture, plunder, rape, punishing people for the sins of others, and punishing people for blameless error are not permitted. It follows that any doctrine that entails that such things are permitted is false. I accept the logic of this argument. But I deny that atheism entails that such things are permitted. This charge is better made against the evidence for theism. The main evidence for theism is scripture. If we take this evidence with the utmost seriousness, as inerrant, then the evidence entails that the evil practices listed above are permitted, since the God of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran either commits these deeds himself, is prophecied to commit them in the future, or commands humans to commit them. Since these practices are not permitted, the evidence for theism is systematically unreliable--so unreliable, that it cannot be trusted to advance the case for theism at all. I consider theistic replies to this argument, and go on to consider independent evidence for the incorrigible unreliability of all the types of extraordinary evidence offered for the existence of God: testimonies of miracles, revelations in dreams or what people take to be direct encounters with God, experiences of divine presence, and prophecies that have been subject to test. These types of evidence are equally available to all religions, including pagan religions. There is no independent natural evidence that supports the extraordinary evidence for one sort of God or gods more than another. Nor do we have other noncircular tests for determining the reliability of extraordinary evidence. It follows that these purported types of evidence make no proposition about the divine more probable than any other contradictory proposition about the divine. Such "evidence" is no evidence at all. In other words, there is no evidence for the existence of a theistic (personal) God."
Her thinking is thus: if the moral pursuasion for truly moral conduct is from religion, then from whence do we derive the repulsion for the worst that humanity can do, even when these are permitted by a religion? It must be a part of our unconscious, our built-in, human 'moral compass' that finds genocide, or mutilation of babies' sex organs, the rape of young women, the slaughter of innocents in war, or torture to obtain a confession of 'sins' as repugnant as we do. Yet the holy books of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam all permit and even exhort these unconscionable acts. So if the religious texts "permit all things", as they do, then it is religion itself that teaches and preaches immorality. It is contrary to our basic human nature to embrace these conducts, yet our major religions teach us that, when directed by their version of God, it is right and good to do so.
Religion, then, teaches that it, alone, can provide the basis for morality; yet it is religion that has shown us the greatest immoralities of history. In our gullibility, our unthinking, unquestioning, uncritical state of mind, we accept this dichotomy without question. And echo in unison that without religion the world would be bereft of morality and any code of ethics.
But with the words of Dr. Anderson in front of us, we can be assured that only the rational mind of a person as yet unspoilt by religious belief will be able to resist the "Godly" leadership that has dragged humanity into its deepest cesspools of despicable conduct; and only the rational mind of the 'unbeliever' can plot the course necessary for us to rid our planet of the disease of "Godly" morality.
This essay, amongst others, reinforces my personal dictum: "Reliance on Ancient Mythologies is Degrading to the Rational Mind."
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