Imagine No Religion. Here's What It Looks Like.The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch imagined a world with no religion in his iconic painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights," depicted above (click here for high resolution image). The central panel of the triptych shows "how humanity would be without a fall, living in paradise without knowledge of right and wrong," says the Dutch/American biologist Frans de Waal, who was born in the same city as Bosch and sees the artist as part of a very long humanist tradition in the Netherlands that goes back to Erasmus and Spinoza.Waal argues that moral behavior is a product of evolution in his book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, which explores examples of altruistic behavior in primates such as chimpanzees. So could mankind be altruistic without religion? Waal sees Bosch's painting as the perfect illustration of humanism. "Some people find those paintings morbid or horrifying," he tells us, "and that’s because he showed Hellish scenes. But actually The Garden of Earthly Delights, most of that painting is delightful.
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