We Knew Murder Was Wrong Before Any Book Told Us So

Let’s start with something uncomfortable.

A child who has never seen a religious text, never stepped inside a temple or a church, never heard the word “sin” — will still cry when they see another child get hurt. They will still share their food when someone is hungry. They will still feel something dark and wrong inside when they witness cruelty.

Nobody taught them that from a book.

So before we ask whether religion is the source of absolute morality — let’s ask the more honest question first.

Did morality exist before religion? Or did religion arrive first and hand it to us?

The answer changes everything.

We Invented Religion. Not The Other Way Around.

Here’s the truth nobody in a religious household wants to say out loud.

We didn’t discover religion the way we discovered fire or gravity. We built it. Deliberately. To solve specific human problems.

Early humans were terrified. Not just of predators or famine — but of the big unanswerable questions. What happens when we die? Why do good people suffer? Why are we even here?

Science had no answers yet. So we did what humans have always done when they face something they don’t understand — we created a story. A powerful, beautiful, comforting story. With characters. With rules. With consequences.

We called it religion.

And it worked. Brilliantly, actually.

It gave frightened people a framework. It gave suffering people a reason — God is testing me. It gave poor people patience — my reward comes later. It gave societies a shared code of behavior with divine consequences for breaking it.

Stephen Hawking said humans created religion because we desperately needed answers. We were curious, scared, and completely alone in a universe we didn’t understand. Religion was our first attempt at making sense of everything.

But here’s where it gets complicated.

Fear of God Is Not Morality

Think honestly about why most religious people follow moral rules.

Don’t steal — because God is watching. Don’t lie — because there will be judgment. Be kind — because heaven is the reward and hell is the alternative.

That’s not morality. That’s a transaction. That’s obedience dressed up as virtue.

Real morality isn’t “I won’t hurt you because I’m afraid of punishment.”

Real morality is “I won’t hurt you because I understand that your pain is real and it matters.”

Those two things sound similar. They are completely different.

One disappears the moment the fear disappears. The other doesn’t need fear at all.

The Part Nobody Wants To Say

The Bible didn’t condemn slavery. The Gita justified a rigid caste system for centuries. Religious authorities told women for thousands of years that they were lesser — that questioning this was itself a sin.

If religion was the source of absolute morality — how did it get these things so catastrophically wrong?

And more importantly — who fixed them?

Not religion. Not scripture.

Us. Humans. Arguing, debating, experiencing the consequences of cruelty and deciding collectively that we were done with it. Slaves who refused their chains. Women who refused their silence. Ordinary people who looked at the world and said — this is wrong, regardless of what any book says.

Every real moral progress in history came from humans pushing against the religious consensus of their time. Not with it.

The Mirror Problem

Here’s the most revealing thing researchers have found about religion and morality.

When people’s moral opinions changed — when they updated their views after hearing new arguments — their idea of what God believed changed with it. God somehow always ended up agreeing with whatever the person had just decided was right.

Think about what that means.

People aren’t getting their morality from God. They’re projecting their existing morality onto God. Religion becomes a mirror, not a window. It reflects what we already believe and wraps it in divine authority.

The compass came first. The book came second.

This is also why Karl Marx called religion the opium of the people. Not out of hatred — but because he saw what it was doing. Making unbearable lives bearable. Turning suffering into a divine test. Keeping people patient with situations that should have made them furious.

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And powerful people have always understood this. That’s why they fund religion. A population that believes suffering is God’s plan is a population that doesn’t revolt.

That’s not morality. That’s control.

So Where Does Absolute Morality Actually Come From?

Here is the most important question. And I want to answer it carefully.

Look at the moral progress humanity has actually made.

We now believe slavery is wrong. We believe women are equal. We believe children deserve protection. We believe torture is unacceptable. We believe every human being has inherent dignity regardless of where they were born.

None of these ideas came from a single holy book. Many of them came despite holy books.

They came from something else entirely — from humans looking at suffering and recognising it. From reason applied to real experience. From the simple question: does this cause harm? From debate, argument, evidence, and the slow painful expansion of who we consider worthy of moral consideration.

Morality is not a fixed destination that was handed to us. It is something we are building — the same way we build science.

Think about how science works. Newton was right about gravity — until Einstein showed he was incomplete. Einstein was right — until quantum mechanics showed the picture was even more complex. Science does not treat its old answers as sacred. It tests them. It challenges them. It updates them when better evidence arrives.

Moral progress works exactly the same way.

We used to think slavery was natural. Then we thought about it harder and we changed.

We used to think women were less capable. Then we looked at the evidence and we changed.

We are currently thinking about animal suffering, about future generations, about artificial intelligence and what moral consideration they deserve. We will change again.

As Bertrand Russell said — ”The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Not by scripture. Not by fear. By love — which is human. And knowledge — which grows.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant gave us something called the categorical imperative — act only according to principles you would want to become universal laws. No God required. Just reason applied honestly.

And Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, argued that morality can be grounded in science — in the real, measurable wellbeing of conscious creatures. That some answers to moral questions are objectively better than others, and we can figure out which ones through evidence and rational thinking.

This is where absolute morality is actually heading.

Not down from heaven. Up from us.

What Religion Actually Is

Religion is not the source of morality. But it was one of the earliest and most powerful structures for organising and spreading it.

Think of it this way. Morality is the electricity. Religion was one of the first grids built to carry it — imperfect, sometimes dangerous, but functional enough to light up large parts of the world for a long time.

The problem is when we confuse the grid for the electricity itself.

Some things religion got right, it got right because it was echoing something true that was already in us. Some things it got wrong, it got wrong because it was written by humans who were products of their time.

No human, however wise, has ever been able to fully escape their time.

The Question Nobody Has Escaped For 2,400 Years

Plato asked this before any modern religion even existed.

Is something good because God commands it? Or does God command it because it’s already good?

If good is only good because God says so — morality is just obedience to authority. Change the authority, morality changes with it.

If God commands things because they’re already good — then goodness exists independently of God. And we can access it independently too. Through reason. Through empathy. Through experience.

Through simply being human.

One Last Thought

We knew it was wrong to hurt each other before any book told us so. We knew it because we could feel each other’s pain. Because we recognised ourselves in each other.

Religion took that understanding and gave it structure. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes terribly.

But the understanding was always ours.

Maybe the real moral evolution is to stop waiting for a book to tell us what’s right — and start trusting the thing that was always there before any book arrived.

If this made you think — share it with someone who needs to read it today.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.