Don't Destroy What Took Millennia To Create

"Today we generally eschew cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, and wars of conquest, because of a millennial process of social evolution, the gradual universalization of certain moral beliefs that entered human experience in the form, not of natural intuitions, but of historical events. We have come to find a great many practices abhorrent, and a great many others commendable, not because the former transparently offend against our nature, while the latter clearly correspond to it, but because at various moments in human history, we found ourselves addressed by uncanny voices that seemed to emanate from outside the totality of the perceptible natural order and its material economies." (David Bentley Hart)

"Once you wait out the residual cultural momentum of a comprehensive system of belief, does there really exist a 'natural morality' that some philosophers have written about, that will constrain human behavior, without the commandments of a God, or the guns of a police force? The charitable acts of a Christian are enjoined by his God; an atheist might be at least as charitable, or more so. But five hundred years on, in a society without belief, do the charitable and self-restraining beliefs survive, or do men revert to the world that prevailed ten thousand years ago?" (Hieronimo, from Six Word Memoirs)