No Religious Belief Is Required to Understand Reciprocity
as the primary principle of an ethical compass.
It's a simple logical concept:
If you can identify a good action, based on your own response to it, then acting in that way is probably a good thing to do.
Conversely, if your response to an action by others is negative, then taking such actions is probably a bad thing to do.
Every religion contains a prescription to use reciprocity to make decisions on actions. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a common expression, as is the converse "Do not do to others what you would not want done to you."
There is a reason such statements are common to all religious doctrine. That reason is that the concept of reciprocity is so simple to understand that it is part of basic ethics in all human societies.
Pretty much all behavioral rules that have to do with how we treat others derive from that simple reciprocity statement:
Don't kill people. Nobody wants to be killed, so killing is bad.
Don't steal. Nobody wants someone to steal their junk, so stealing is obviously bad.
Don't commit adultery. Almost everyone dislikes having someone else having sex with their own partner.
Don't lie. If someone tells a lie about you, you don't like it, so don't lie about other people.
And so on. Religion is not required to understand any of that. The fact that such rules are encoded in religious scriptures does not mean that they originated in those scriptures. In fact, reciprocity is so easy to understand that it forms the ethical basis of almost all human interactions.
If someone follows a religion based on its presentation of rules based on reciprocity, they should understand that reciprocity is a universal principle that is common to all human cultures and societies. It's so simple that it is the easiest principle to understand of all.
How does that feel to you? If you don't like it, don't do it to others.
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"I cannot explain the conflict between people and the beliefs they claim to adhere to but do not. I can certainly observe it, though."
That should be on a t-shirt
