From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: Why should you care for the needy? Why should you donate blood? Why should you refrain from murder and robbery? You can't possibly say that the only reason to do it is because God will punish you in an afterlife. If God's back was turned, does that mean it would be okay to kill and rob or let people drown or starve? I can think of plenty of secular reasons to do it. Namely, I would not want to be left to starve or drown or die of lack of blood. I would not want to be the victim of murder or robbery. There's nothing special about me, and therefore what I demand of everyone else, I have to accept for myself. It is clear that we would all be better off in a world where everyone helped each other and refrained from hurting each other compared to a society where everyone was a rapacious psychopath. That's why we should be moral. God has nothing to do with it. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What happens in Dr. Pinker's argument is that as an heir of Jewish and Christian civilization, he imports, as this kind of commonsensical position, metaphysical propositions about the existence of these human rights that no one has ever seen of or heard of. He cannot show me a human right under a microscope. He cannot prove to me in a mathematical theorem why segregation was wrong, why it was wrong to murder people in the gulag or the concentration camp for the sake of a better tomorrow. He asserts that it's necessary for, again, sort of decency and order and so on, and often it is, but there has to be a stronger reason when you find yourself in a position where what the society says is out of joint with what you think are the fundamental truths about the universe.