Atheist Memes

Sorta!

We are extremely social creatures, and have had some intrinsic social instincts honed into us from eons of evolution. When it comes to our fellow tribemates, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt, even when they're total assholes. We see this in great effect when drivers in merging traffic will let other into their line, even though they are total strangers and are sharing a dear resource (a pathway home).

I suspect that most Christians, when they assert that only fear of God's justice (or even state justice) is what keeps them from murder that they really haven't put it to the test. We may be angry. We may desire, as Nietzsche suggests, to discharge our strength but we also are resistant to hurting the innocent, which becomes difficult when the enemy soldiers look like us (rather than different colored people with weird accents) and when we know they're our own countrymen, armies infamously refuse to fight and mutiny.

It's obviously more complex than this. We only want our tribe to be as big as our top 100 facebook friends -- what may be an instinct to keep COVID-19 from running worldwide -- and when it comes to large societies we have to practice putting principle over loyalty, which is why we're prone to fascist movements when we challenge the feudal / capitalist establishment.

And yes, some rare folk are natural soldiers and don't have to navigate feelings before killing. And rarer ones still are driven by sexual dysfunction or narcissism to ignore the interests of others, even killing as necessary. But these are very much the exception. Most of us, by far, are quite affable and have to be driven to desperation before we consider wrongdoing. The scary ones are elite deviants like the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. In 2021 their drug marketing campaign killed 80,000 Americans, and we expect even more in 2022 and 2023. More lives would be saved, more destruction and cost prevented _by multiple orders of magnitude) if the US law enforcement ignored petty crime altogether and focused solely on white collar crime. But that's a topic for another rant.