sex-death-and-the-meaning-of-life

More and more of us realise there is no God, and yet religion still has a hold over us. I think ideas of saints and sinners heaven and hell still shape our thinking. I want to give you a scientific alternative. This series is not about whether God exists or not. It explores more challenging questions. I'm going to be asking what happens as we move on and leave religion behind. What will guide and inspire us in a world free of all gods? How can an atheist find meaning in life? How can we face death without the comfort of the afterlife? And how should we think about right and wrong? I have to believe there's a plan and God is going to accomplish something through this. I suppose Jesus is an unpaid babysitter. It's like if I'm not watching you, Jesus is. So do you think that we in the West are too materialistic? I think so. This film is about sin. Even today, most of us still carry around the religious notion of sin to tell right from wrong. People ask me if you give up religion doesn't that mean anything goes. Why not indulge in temptations in lust and greed? Why not rape? Why not steal? I'm going to explore the power, the religious idea of sin as over our lives. Explain why it's unhelpful and show how we can use reason and science to find a better way to be good. Cars were set a light and shops looted. If we don't believe God is watching over us, we abandon morality. That's what people say to me. Are they right? This is London 2011. For the past two nights there have been riots that have been windows smashed, that have been looting. It's hard to know why that doesn't seem to be any very well articulated. Political motive, no religious motive. It seems to be just more or less advocate for its own sake, looting for its own sake. I suppose it's showing how fragile the bonds of society are, how easily broken they can be. And it's really quite frightening in a way. Before I look at what reason can tell us about this, I want to explore the case for religious morality. To understand the challenge facing atheists like me, you need to meet someone like Ray Lewis. Even boys? How are you? Newham, East London. In a neighborhood ravaged by drugs and gang violence, youth workers are fighting back with a tough love approach inspired by Christian faith. Some of you have got homework. Who's going to say, lead us in grace today before supper? Well done, Moses, come out in front of here, son. It's about heads in prayer. God bless this food as we eat today. Some of the riots that we saw in different parts of England revealed that we are in a great state of crisis. I think what was going on was a sense in which, frankly, why not? What is it that will restrain me from getting involved in that? That's what we're working with against that backdrop. We've got to carve out something where the boys know where they are. Is the discipline stricting here in England? Yeah, yeah. And you've got talk about things like what's right and wrong. What do you learn about? Need a bit? Yeah. I've told you the situation which is very encourage, decisiveness, initiative, integrity, judgment, college, perseverance. Very good, personal, very good. I think that this country, this part is which is morally bankrupt. I talk with a young man here recently, the other day he said, I've been here for 18 months. And I realise I don't have to lie and steal. He realised he doesn't have to do it. He's 14 years old. I said, what would you mean? He said, well, he said every time someone asked me a question, it never dawned on me to tell the truth. It's just a grown-up in a culture where everybody lies, everybody cheats, everybody receives. Rail Lewis makes a powerful case for the clear-cut rules of religion. For him, God and an afterlife instill a sense of responsibility in this life. I believe that there's a spirit in a man and a woman that goes on beyond and therefore at some point that has to come into account. That's what I choose to believe. I'm not going to argue for the science of it. But what I would say is I actually do believe that there will be a point at which we have to give an account for the lives that we've been given. I think there's no evidence that we do survive, dear. This life is what we've got. That should really redouble our efforts to make this life worth. One not just for ourselves, but for other people, try to make the world a better place because it's the only world we've got. I wonder whether or not you have rejected the trappings, the bullshit of religion rather than looking behind it. Because you see, for me, to look beyond this life gives this life a greater sense of focus. That I think is something that religion brings and gives and celebrates. And without that Richard, we've just got intellectual masturbation of what we... We don't all have your intellect and your scientific genius. So how are we going to get to the point that we can work at all out? And this kind of funny dirty world. I have no illusions, I mean it's very, very difficult. And my solution would not be a religious one. You try to educate people, which you're doing brilliantly, it seems to me, because sit down together and talk to each other and say, I would not wish to live in the kind of society. Without religion, do you not lose power? What drives me in this work is some sense of the spirit, Martin Luther King, he talked about soul force, Gandhi was very much leading on his spiritual sense of God, if you like. Where if you don't have that, how is it going to happen, there's no power? This is challenging. There's no doubt that Ray Lewis is being very effective. I can see the value of invoking God's authority and great leaders like Martin Luther King and Gandhi who had religion too, but there's a problem. This approach is about persuading children that they'll be held to account in an afterlife, but there's no evidence for that, and the more you think about it, the more implausible it seems. And also, do we really want to take our morals straight from the rather rigid rule book of an ancient desert tribe? Yep, it's your move. Alrighty then, jump steady. You remember King Solomon? Yeah, well, I never met him personally. One of the most wise kings that ever walked the face of the planet Earth, but his wisdom did not come overnight. He had to humble his spirit and bow down to the true and living God. People tell me that if there is no God, there is no morality. It's true that throughout human history religion has handed down simple rules on what's good and bad. But it's a belief system rooted in a Bronze Age view of the world, obsessed with sex and policing the purity of the tribe. Before I set out the rational view of morality, I want to explain the problems with the old religious moral codes. Here we go. Understanding the enemy, three enemies we face, the world, the devil, the flesh. We're going to go fairly quickly through the world and the devil. We're going to spend most of our time today dealing with the flesh. What we don't want to do is get hung up on, oh the devil made me do it. We just want to see how the devil interacts and specifically how Jesus modeled some countermeasures. As temptation. This is every man's battle. The Christian ministry that runs hundreds of workshops across America every year. Here they adapt ancient scriptures to try to fight modern male temptations like internet pool. It's in offers us the opportunity to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way. Let's talk about the body for a minute and masturbation. If you continue to do it, you will be perpetually locked into this struggle with your sexual integrity. Does this make sense? Questions? Christianity has always been peculiarly judgmental about what people get up to in the bedroom. But do we really want to brand every day thoughts as sinful? I don't deserve my family as a shame message they would hear. These are in a list of probably 40 or 50 different shame messages that they can choose from, or they can write in their own. A couple months ago we had a guy here who his shame message was, I'm a f**king idiot. I wasn't a new list. I was not on our list. I'm not keeping very hard on yourselves. No, I don't think so. My story is filled with pornography, masturbation, online affairs, that eventually went offline. So I came to the point of really just being suicidal. I hated my behavior, I hated myself. I had prayed a bajillion times for God to show up and he wouldn't. It's like he was silent. I wasn't about to tell my wife or any of my friends. My wife would divorce me and my friends would disown me. So I came to this place and the only way for this to end is for me to kill myself. I had this moment in the shower where I fell to the bottom of the shower and this puddle of tears, and vomit, and soapy water under the weight of the reality of my life that I can't fix this. I cried out to God in surrender. You have to fix this. And that's when everything changed for me. This is my wife's shell and my son Truman a couple years ago, a hiking in veil. When I think about the way that this day went or I think about that day right there, the last thing that I want to do is cheat on that woman. The last thing I want to do is tell this little boy, hey, your dad was an adulterer and then he got his life right, and then he racked it again. I don't want to have that conversation. Jason, no doubt, has Lord of all aims. But does this preaching work? Do religious believers resist temptation better than anyone else? In 2011 the psychologist Darrell Ray scoured the evidence. Through an online survey he interrogated over 14,000 people who had left their churches, such as about their sex lives before and after religion. We asked four questions. When did you start masturbating? When did you start having oral sex? When did you start petting? When did you start having intercourse? And we compared those people who were raised most religious, against those people who raised religious. And we had thousands of people in both of these groups. And what we found was there's almost no difference. Now we did see a little bump in pornography. The older religious people got, the more they used pornography. And they actually exceed non-religious people by 5% or 10% in the use of pornography. Whether your religious are not biology happens, you're going to start masturbating, you're start having sex. But what's the difference? The religious people feel a lot of guilt about the pre-marital sex they're having or about the masturbation they started. And they don't know what to do with it. So there's really no difference in the actual sexual behavior that religious and non-religious people indulge in. What is different is the guilt they feel. Exactly. Or the trial when they delay. And the religions preach against pornography and preach against masturbation. And preach against criminal sex. And it does no good. The highest use of pornography in the United States is in Utah. And Mississippi. So these are things that churches preach against. And yet their members are using it even more than secular people do. When I give my talks on sex, I often ask, how many of you master bait. And I'll get people raised in their hands all over the place. Maybe 80% or 80% or they both answer. If I ask that same question in a religious group, nobody will raise their hand. But we know that somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of males masturbate and 70% to 75% of females masturbate. So if nobody's raising their hand, that tells us they're lying. Religious people lie. My own grandmother lived 83 years. She went to the grave. Denying that she was ever divorced. Because her religious beliefs said, divorced people are condemned and damned. So she never admitted it. We all knew she had. But that's the power of religion to hold an entire lifetime hostage. That's a lot of pain. So the extraordinary thing is that not only does religion fail to stop people sinning, it also forces them to live a lie. The most powerful example of this I found in Paris. Here we can see religious tradition for what it is, as the lies spiral into hypocrisy. A few hundred meters from the smart boutiques of the Shanzi Lize in Paris, the plastic surgeon Dr. Mark Abekar Sees can cover up the sins of the past. He specializes in repairing the high men membrane in women's vagina. To all appearances he turns women who've had sex back into virgins again. You can ask yourself, as a surgeon, is it fair? Am I in the right path to do that? And this are questions that we ask a lot to the patients. Are you going to be sincere doing that, Miss? Yes, aren't you building a wedding or a relation on a lie? And you know, more and more I ask these questions, more and more I have the same answers. They just ask me, Dr. Abekar Sees, who do you think you are? Maybe I'm not going to be a virgin in the facts, but I want to rehabilitate myself. I want to restore my integrity. This is a purinous to give back to the person I will, I shall love or I shall marry with. But this high men reconstruction, it's just symbolic of something which is not there, as it's a lie. It's a lie for you. It's a lie for you. Dr. Abekar Sees performs around four of these operations every week, and demand is growing. The majority of patients are Algerian Muslims, and for many, sadly this is not some luxury option, but grim necessity. They tell you my brother is going to kill me. There is this bad situation in which they are going to be, if they don't present an intact membrane. So that means if they don't bleed, does it? So they know today more and more that they are not obliged to bleed, but they know that if there will be a resistance during the intercourse, so things are going to be alright. And he's going to feel the husband who's going to feel that there is something. For her own safety, this patient has asked to remain anonymous. I don't rest, I don't think so, because after all I have a family which remains quite humane. But do we speak that part? Judged. In no African society, you don't wash your dirty linen in public. Religious faith is supposed to make us pure, but this woman is caught between two sins, public shame, and private deception. I think that in front of God, I shall be alone. In front of my community, my image will also punish my family, and I am not alone. You see what I mean? That's to say, it's not just me that they'll be judging. They'll be judging my parents, my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts. Because I observe it when I look around at where I was leaving, the society full of lies, I don't feel guilty at all. It's not just that the old notion of sin isn't relevant anymore. We've seen that it clashes with reality. It creates guilt and a society full of lies. Next, I want to leave God behind and explore what science can tell us about the true origins of morality. Some people think that if we get rid of God and all religious values, all that's left is anarchy. But I want to show that there is order without religion. Let's look at the roots of morality through Darwinian eyes. One thing we must do is rid ourselves of the idea that sexual lust is inherently sinful. These impulses are universal and all mammals have evolved ways to manage them. What's that funny patch I can see under his arm there? This lamp you can see here is the breakable glands and it's where he'll scent mark, so the female can smell where he's at a good fit male. That Cotsworld Wildlife Park. The keepers are trying to get a rare and endangered species, the greater bamboo lemur to mate successfully. But to do that, they have to carefully observe the rituals of Lima courtship. It's been very good now, he's actually given us some of the calls which sort of a beginning of this courtship display and is called the real dig. There's the tail twitching and all of this, she becomes more and more interested in his behaviour. Perhaps we think of morality in completely the wrong way. By observing animals, we see it not a some set of lofty ideals, but as a practical system that enables animals to get along with each other, we produce and survive. Javi, I was once asked by a lawyer when he discovered that I was as aologist, where the animals have a sense of law. And I said, well, not exactly law, but like many human scientists that don't have lawyers in policemen, they have customs and taboo and rules that they've found. Yeah, I would say they certainly do. You know, there's almost a feeding order, the dominant animal would get the best of the food or the food first. Even if that means that doesn't mean that others may not try to get in their first, very much like in human society. But if they're seen, they'll certainly fall back into line. It's the biggest male generally that all breed. Critical for any animals' genetics access are the customs surrounding sex and the violence and competition that's in the world. Three hundred sixty four days the year the females are the boss. The males are laid back. He keeps out of the way. Keeps himself to himself and just tries to avoid trouble generally. But the one day the year sometimes more that the females become sexually receptive. Things change. Things become very, very lawless for the male. And if there was more than one breeding male, it really is a fight to the death. So they fight to the death on that one day. They can do. I mean, generally one animal would be severely injured and they do. They do stink fighting, which is very interesting, where they raise their tails towards each other, woth them towards each other so they can deter the other male. And then they do something called slash fighting, where they're run past each other. And it's very hard to even see. They've touched each other. But then there'll be some terrible slashing injuries generally in the world. They like medieval answers on their horses, rushing past each other. Very much like that. Yes. So from a very coherent society, most of the year, it all falls to pieces where sex is concerned. This isn't what we'd call morality, but the customs and taboo as we see here help us understand something about sex. Sex is on the face of it. There are the bizarre way of passing on genes, since it necessitates joining with another individual, each contributing exactly half the genes to each offspring. Many animals devote enormous energy to displaying their attributes to would be mates, signaling they are fit and healthy specimens. They advertise through carrying vivid plumage, vast antlers and horns or an outside tail. You might think of it as nature's bling. Human's also do this, just sometimes in a more roundabout way. Dunses like the tango, for example, are courtship rituals in human form. Darwinian theory is really a sort of branch of economics. You might think that the two sexes are kind of equal, they both have the same amount to gain from mating. Losso. The goods that a female mammal brings to the deal are her womb, time devoted to the baby inside it, and milk to feed it. The male generally provides protection and food. So far so good, but the male and female have very different genetic interests, which is where it gets interesting. The male has the most again, why if he can, persuading lots of females to make with him and leaving each one to fend for herself, the female has the most again from persuading one male to be loyent to her, and to provide a full economic upbringing for her offspring. This constant economic tussle between the sexes which makes courtship so important. There's a lot at stake. The male tries to ensure that the female is faithful, so he doesn't bring up another male's child and perpetuate another male's genes. The female must be faithful or at least appear to be, or the male may abandon her and force her to bring up the offspring on her own. So one key characteristic we see being displayed in animal courtship is what we humans would call jealousy. The males will tend to be coy and will tend to advertise their fidelity and advertise their faithfulness to the male. Males on the other hand will tend to go and make guardian, say, putting an arm round of women at her at a social gathering. So evolutionary science shows you don't need religion to have order and even courtesy in relationships. It's not just anything goes and sex in the street. That's been tried in the past with all results. Well, I think what's happening in San Francisco is the only meaningful thing that's happening in this country in quite possibly the world. In the 1960s, the San Francisco Bay area was at the heart of the hippie experiment in so-called free love. I remember it well because I was there. Well, this is telegraph avenue which used to be filled with street people, selling beads and carpets and drugs and things. Can't see any sign of activity today, but possibly it's just because it's only about 9 o'clock in the morning. We have a lot of that. I used to live here in the late 1960s. I was a very junior faculty member at University of California. And it was a time of great political unrest. It was the time of the Vietnam War. There was tear gas. There were riot police, national guard, bayonets. Part of the rebellion against authority came in tried through of sexual inhibitions. Coines and mate Gardy were out. The sexual culture was pretty free rather shockingly so. I remember once walking down this very street and there was a young man walking ahead of me sort of hippie type. And every young woman who came towards him, he would just reach out and feel her breast. And then just walk on and she took the slightest notice. Another time I saw a young woman in telegraph avenue can deeply make it. That is a very clear memory. It definitely happened. But that 60s culture of letting it all hang out didn't last. I'm intrigued by why all that's left today are tourists. Grissel street sellers and dirty needles in the park. Perhaps the answer lies once again in understanding our evolution as a species. Science suggests that the rules we've evolved around courtship at sex are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight. This is the reaction that I have. These are crabs they're used for seasony. The man assaulting my senses is the psychologist David Pizarro. Oh my god, that makes me want to read. He is studying the science of disgust. This is from the film. Train spotting. Apply titled the worst toilet in Scotland. Gioca. That's horrible. I'm showing you a reportion I could see. I could see the disgust in your face. But what if I were to say to present you with something like this? I asked you to handle it and maybe put it in your mouth. Well, I mean, I couldn't tell that's a joke. This actually wouldn't worry me all that much. You might trust that I wouldn't put actual views. Yes. As it turns out, this is so. So, now you'll tell me I wouldn't mind washing my hands. That's right. So now I'm going to show you a few other images. They're different from the first ones I showed you. You'll see immediately why. Oh god. David Pizarro shows me a highly graphic image of three elderly men engaged in homosexual sex. Now I'm looking at a degrading sexual act involving vomit. I'll leave this at two because these are actually so disgusting that I feel bad having shown them to you. Those two images were images of a sexual nature. And as it turns out, the domain of sex is one in which we're easily disgusted. The Yuck reaction is an emotion that almost certainly evolved to help us survive to make us back off from potential disease. But what's fascinating is how disgust seems to have been harnessed to reinforce our sense of judgment and moral disapproval. I kept finding that responses to questions like how disgust would you be if you were to walk into a public restroom and found an unflash toilet. We're consistently correlated with political orientation. The more likely you are to be disgusted in everyday life, the more likely you are to hold attitudes in the sexual domain, especially that are more or beliefs against, for instance, the behavior of two men having sex. Yes, I mean, let me ask a question about that because I had to fairly strong Disgust reaction to some of the things you showed. But the important difference is that I don't try to impose my own dislikes on what other people are allowed to do. It's nothing to do with me what people do in private. I think that's the crucial distinction. But it is a very common thought and very moral codes across the world that many things are wrong by the intent of there being somehow impure. I think that the real answer here comes from the fact that we can now actually see what is harmful and what is not. And we can decide to put our disgust to rest when it comes to making moral judgments. One of the things that I ask my students in my classes, imagine two very, very ugly people having sex. It's disgusting. It's not a good one. But would you ever think to make any legal for ugly people to have sex? Is it all of course not? Well, maybe it's a case in which we might be able to say, you know what? I'm grossed out by what you're doing, but that has nothing to do with whether you should be put in prison for it. This is the key point. We have instincts that used to protect our primitive ancestors. Because of that, we may still find some things emotionally repellent. But we have evolved also a sense of reason, which curbs our tendency to project our disgust onto other people. In our post-religion world, we can look rationally at what we once call sinful behavior. We can weigh up actual harms and benefits and temper our instincts. In this way, advanced societies like ours can move on, shifting the line on what is deemed right or wrong. Probably the dominant change in my lifetime is a change in attitude towards gaze. When I first entered Parliament in 1979, I started campaigning. And not for equal rights, we wouldn't have dared use a word like equal rights. But I would start campaigning for a measure of respect for homosexuals. By thought if I was very lucky, we might get the age of consent reduced from 21 to 18 by the time I died. I thought I was very lucky. I could stop in the police impersonating gaze in order to pick people up in public lavatories and then prosecute them. These things seem to change so slowly and then suddenly like an avalanche, everything changed. And long before the end of my life, I cannot believe the speed with what seemed to be a really fixed public. Loving of homosexuality has changed to a shrug of the shoulders. Matthew Paris believes it is our capacity for reason that lies behind this growing tolerance. In our culture, the advance of science, the advance of scientific, medical, psychological knowledge, the understanding that things are not... ...rooted in sin that comes from demons and the devil. But rooted in very deep, internal aspects of our own mechanisms of our own minds. So, so blame is much less important in these things. And of course, illnesses used to be attributed sometimes to sin. Two, well, it isn't a matter of sin. It isn't a matter of blame. And I think those altitude, attitude has probably been changing over 200 years. And the change has accelerated in the last century. It seems like a wonderfully positive story, but Matthew Paris does have concerns. Well, what we say more liberal, more tolerant, what you and I would think of as better, we're actually getting better. I suppose though that a fear that certainly haunts me and others in the gay liberation movement is that things could swing so rapidly in our favor as they have. Could we in a sort of third Reich, like world sea things, swinging very rapidly, equally rapidly, the other way? About how little anchored, perhaps, are these categories? Yes. There's a sort of feeling of hatred for bankers, for rich people, for plutocrates. At the moment, I could imagine a little winter, with a little ice age, for the richest in society, coming as the western economy sinks. And as a people looking for somebody to blame, just as the Jews got it in the next so to speak between the two wars. I understand what Matthew Paris is getting at, but I think I'm more optimistic about human nature. I want to argue that now we've left religion behind, we are getting better, more moral and kinder. If you want to understand what makes a human being good, watch them with a pet. Tyco is a wolf, or he thinks he's a wolf, he's not very distant ancestors with wolves. Good dog Tyco. He loves going for a wolf because he's looking at what's happened during the night, but he can tell from the smell that it'd be left. He won't take a... he's stopped, he's at every corner, stopped at every lamp post. It's sort of like reading the newspaper for him, I think. It's a very different world to be in a dog's world. And we anthropomorphize, we put ourselves in the position of the dog, project ourselves into the body of the dog, and we think we know what it's like to be a dog. And we don't, we dilude ourselves, but that's part of what goes on when we love a dog. Tyco, do you like going to public class? Do you? And do you play with Figgy? And do you play with Dennis? What am I doing with my dog? And do you play with Watson? I'm empathizing. Immunitive leap to see the world from a dog's perspective. Poor, good boy. Humans are extraordinarily good at identifying with other humans and other species. And it has a profoundly moral effect. When we see a dog or a person suffering, we suffer too. We suffer the careously, it's a very powerful emotion. If I see Tyco suffering, if he's ill in pain, I feel devastated. And it's exactly as that was my own child, I suppose. Tyco, how bout you pour? Emphasis important for morality, because perhaps the most fundamental principle of morality, the golden rule, involves putting yourself in the position of another. Do as you would be done by, how would you like it if you were treated like that? We don't need God telling us the rule. Science shows we humans are hardwired to have empathy. Scientists can ask scan which parts of the brain register for careous pain or pleasure. They can track how hormones like oxytocin, which encourage compassion and nurturing act on the emotion systems in the brain. Brain science helps us to see why we find it a bad idea to steal, why we hate to see somebody kicking a dog. We can trace the chemicals in the brain that reward kindness. We can see what goes on in the brain when we feel for others. Goodness is natural to us. Kindness is in our physiology. So you might ask quite rightly if humans have this innate capacity for good, why does it go wrong? Why do we still do bad things? Perhaps there's a scientific answer to that too. Here we go back to those primitive moral emotions that helped us survive. We've got empathy. You've got kindness. You've got nurturing. You've got all of this, but you also have discussed. You've got cruelty. You've got fear. And all of those are evolved to protect you and your kin. The neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor has studied what happens when people decide that others are not included in their tribe. She calls it otherization. The others are commonly classed as beasts or subhuman. You're not just saying that's my enemy. You're actually saying that is a less than human person. I am not going to call that person the same moral status as I would to my nearest and dearest. And those who carried out the final solution in Nazi Germany could only have done it presumably by otherization of the Jews. Because one of the things that otherization does is it suppresses empathy. So for example, the Insatz group and the groups who were committing the worst atrocities on the east and from to the second world war. They're not just forgetting about morality altogether and just engaging in cruelty. Their cruelty is very targeted and very directed. And people who are part of their group, escape cruelty on the whole, and people who are not part of their group, they're the ones who've been bare the brunt of it. But even in the times of horror, there are moments which should be cherished where empathy breaks through. There's an interesting example from the SS of a man who is helping to dispose as they put it of some Jewish children. His parents had already been killed. And he talks about how he was doing it and he had to take the hand of a little girl. And he just couldn't do it. His empathy came back and overwhelmed him. So he's got a lot of ideology, a lot of group pressure saying these people are not human. You will not treat them as human. But it's obvious that if the cues are sufficiently powerful, if you like, that can go, that can be reversed. He was on his own for a little while, with this little girl. And suddenly he was a dad. He realized he was human. If we are to build a non-religious morality, one thing we must continuously avoid is demonizing another set of humans, or treating them as unequal. Quite apart from anything else, this leads to a collapse of empathy. What we need to do is expand the circle of those to whom we feel empathy. Break down the barriers that divide us, the tribalisms of religion, class, race and ideology. Our scientific understanding of empathy and the memory of how we've got it wrong in the past can help. And the good news is we're already doing it. 200 years ago, it was normal, acceptable to keep slaves. Now it would be considered barbaric. The same with racism, I was brought up in British colonial Africa. And I vividly remember the patronizing attitude of the time. The Africans are like children. They can't look after themselves. We have to do it for them. Today, such an attitude would be unthinkable. Our capacity for empathy, together with a more rational, tolerant society, is, I believe, making us more moral than ever before. And yet, if you were to believe some moralists and some newspapers, societies going to hell in a handcard. But is it? The psychologist Steven Pinker has looked at the figures in detail, including data from the British home office and the US Bureau of Justice, and found that, as religion declines, we are becoming ever more civilised. I have no idea that, say, in the last 40 years, the rate of rape had declined by 80%. 80% to 80% to the United States. The rate of domestic abuse in both the UK and the US. In that rate, because even more surprising, because presumably the number of reportings has gone out. Exactly. The child abuse has gone down, attitudes towards racial minorities, attitudes towards homosexuals, treatment of animals in the laboratory. And the perception of these things has gone in the other direction, because everybody thinks that child abuse is blinding, for example. And it may be because of the increased concern that we both think that it's more prevalent than ever before. And we've managed to put it down, because people care about it, take steps to minimize it, and those steps clearly succeed. And there are many positive developments that we take for granted, because they're non-events, they're dogs that don't bark. An example would be the disappearance of war between developed states. Even in the developing world, where we think of as a war-torned, hell-hold. The numbers show that the number of wars and the number of deaths in war have plummeted worldwide in the last 20 years since the end of the Cold War. Deaths are lower in absolute numbers. In a world of 7 billion people, fewer people are dying in warfare than ever before. Are we too down on ourselves? Do you think that actually we're becoming more moral? I don't know if we're becoming more moral biologically, but I think there is something about an society with free speech, with open inquiry, with rational debate, with the accumulation of evidence that will tend to push us in a moral direction. In particular, the whole current that we call humanism, which almost sounds for now and boring and trickly nowadays, simply because it's become second-new. But I think it's a radical idea in human history. The cineac about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven. But the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbed there. Science shows that we're governed by quite logical hidden rules and customs and the highly evolved senses that humans have of reason and empathy. More important, we now live in a rational age and can look at where we've gone wrong in history and avoid the tribalism that divides and harms us. This surely is real progress. We live in what may be a more peaceful, more civilised world than ever before. We have the opportunity to develop a new morality and that is an exciting part of what it means to be human. We're going to be a new generation of human beings. We're going to be a new generation of human beings. Immediately after next week's program, Richard Dawkins will be live online to answer your questions. Until then, go to Channel4.com slash the meaning of life to explore existential reading lists that accompany each episode in the series. And the series does continue next Monday at 10 o'clock here on Warfall.