Heather MacDonald, who writes for the group blog Secular Right, and who participated in a video-taped dialogue entitled "God and Man on the Right", had this to say about religion:
Secular Right has also been arguing that morality comes out of a human, innate moral sense...and religion is parasitic on humans' own moral sense [this is around 3:30 mark and goes on until around 4:00].Part of her argument is that she doesn't think it is necessary to bring "any kind of appeal to revelation" to support and argue for morality, since morality is grounded on "reason, observation of human nature and evidence."
Of course, that begs the question that an "appeal to revelation" is also grounded on "reason, observation of human nature and evidence."
Since humans innately managed to conjure up all these moral codes, who is to say that they couldn't have the innate ability to appeal to revelation, and interact with whoever manages this revelation to produce to those moral codes? Perhaps believers are the folks really grounded in reason.
There is a supreme arrogance in MacDonald's soft-spoken voice when she equates religion as parasitic on humans' moral sense. So, religious people steal from those hard-working secularists (to eventually destroy them, since that is what parasites do) all the morality they've innately developed, and turn around and attribute them to divine revelation.
I've never heard of this argument before. But, it shows a closed-mindedness and dearth of imagination that MacDonald must have that she can't even speculate that just as morality is innate, appeal to revelation is equally innate and acts as precursor to those moral values she thinks she plucks out of the independently working human mind.
In my bias and ignorance, I know that it is secularists who are killing off Europe, which has given up on an "appeal to revelation", as MacDonald so cleverly puts it. Whatever moral codes they have inherited came from this appeal, while their secularists friends thought otherwise. So, who are the parasites now?
