A Superior Morality

What would cause a village of cannibals to give up head-hunting? In the case of the Yali, a primitive tribe in Papua, Indonesia, it was the Bible. When they read the command against murder and about loving one’s neighbor, they stopped eating their enemies._¹

The late US president Woodrow Wilson revered the Bible: “The more you read [it], the more it will become plain to you the things that are worthwhile—loyalty, right dealing, speaking the truth, readiness to give everything for what they think their duty. …and the things that are guaranteed to make men unhappy—selfishness, cowardice, greed, and everything that is low and mean.”

Despite examples like the Yali and Wilson, the outspoken, dogmatic atheist Richard Dawkins believes that the Bible, though great literature, is “not a moral book.”² And British philosopher and atheist A.C. Grayling recently published The Good Book, a secular humanists’ alternative