So I decided to re-read "The God Delusion" the other night and I came across Dawkins' discussion on John Hartung's Essay (titled above) which appeared in Skeptic Magazine in 1995.  The paper is about In-group morality and out-group hostility with an analysis of group selection versus individual selection mixed in.  His Adstract reads:

Quote:

The world's major religions espouse a moral code which includes injunctions against murder, theft and lying. Or so conventional 19th- and 20th-century Western wisdom would have it. Evidence put forth here argues that this convention is a conceit which does not apply to the West's own religious foundations. In particular, rules against murder, theft, and lying codified by the Ten Commandments were intended to apply only within a cooperating group for the purpose of enabling that group to compete successfully against other groups. In addition, this in-group morality has functioned, both historically and by express intent, to create adverse circumstances between groups by actively promoting murder, theft, and lying as tools of competition. Contemporary efforts to present Judeo-Christian in-group morality as universal morality defy the plain meaning of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are based. Accordingly, this effort is ultimately hopeless.

Ultimately, I find this analysis persuasive and accurate, especially when Hartung discusses how it was Paul, not Jesus, who universalizes salvation through Christ Jesus (something our very-own Brian Flemming brings up in "The God Who Wasn't There&quot, arguing that Jesus' intentionality was in line with the in-group thinking of the Old Testament - i.e. the laws, Ten Commandments, even the dictate "Love Thy Neighbor" only ever applied to the Israelites, even right up until the "birth" of Christ (I'm not so sure that "birth" ever happened ...).  Another aspect of this essay that I enjoy (and think is intellectually important) is that  the analysis is essentially the natural history of religion - looking at religion as a natural phenomenon.  I find that looking at socio-historical and religious traditions through the lens of the neo-darwinism/sociobiology/evolutionary psychology is an incredibly useful tool for understanding and contextualizing  the basic beliefs of Jews and Christians.

Has anyone else read this essay?  I know the first step in my deconversion was looking at religion as a natural phenomenon - in otherwords, divorcing the notion that its "true" from my analysis and looking at it through a more objective lens - perhaps if more theists, esp. Jews and Christians, looked at the context in which their religion evolved (whether they choose to see it as social, cultural, historical or natural/literally evolutionary), they would see it less as "true" and more as simply a phenomena that grew up with us out of the dawn of humanity ...