P.S. The play Jumpers by Stoppard is on at the NT right now. Deals with just this topic in a highly clever and amusing way.
Natch clever and amusing (and probably incomprehensible without several degrees and as-yet-undeveloped hypermedia technology), it's Tom Stoppard.
However, "Jumpers" seems to contain many assumptions about religion making people behave themselves, and that without belief in a supreme being, or at least a local[1] set of mores, none of that would work at all. At which point I want to throw the following at Mr Stoppard, but I don't have a time machine:
(a) Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". Musing on holocausts, nuclear, prevention of, Sagan finds some cross-cultural study which finds very strong positive correlations between strongly religious behaviour, and several factors currently often considered to be bad (violence, sexual repression, inequality, neglect of children, ...), which was presumably greeted by howls from anthropologists of "GET THESE BLOODY ATOMIC SCIENTISTS AND THEIR GUILTY CONSCIENCES THE FUCK OFF OUR TURF".
(b) Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", sections on "naturalizing ethics". Where ethics come from; Kantian imperatives ("don't kill", "don't lie") as "best practices" or heuristics, because if you had to work out what would give the best outcome you'd be trying to work out what to do forever. Kantian heuristics mean you can do approximately the right thing. In constant time. </damien>
(c) http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/
WE LIKE THE MOON.
cheers
ti
