Religious Experience and Social Perspective

Once upon a time I was a devout Christian, and since I've lost that bug I've found my social perspective has changed. I still keep in contact with some of my old Christian sparing partners, including Matt and Madeleine Flannagan. One of Matt's favourite moral theories these days is the Divine Command Theory of Ethics. This theorys hold that an action is moral if it does not transgress God's commands, and is immoral if it does. All social problems and social issues are therefore resolved by discerning, or arguing about, what the will of God is. Necessarily, human will and human wants, and human origins of law and morality are necessarily only of moral importance as a means of upholding God's will (for example if God's command is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you). To me this is the extreme form of absolutising a set of rules, and potentially the law and moral rules as a tool for some, or some in the name of God, to rule over others.

Although Christianity is sometimes described as a crutch for the weak, as Madeleine Flannagan posted recently, its power and strength derives from its ability to provide rationale, reason and to make sense of the world. For this reason Madeleine Flannagan encourages Christians to express and engage their doubts and their pains, and to treat Christianity as a serious intellectual system rather than selling it as a superficial emotional experience. However, Christianity isn't the only way of explaining the world or making sense of it, including our social problems and the rules we develop or recognise in order to deal with them. Consider this from John Hasnas:

When I teach Torts, I ask the students to account for these rules. Being products of the legislative age, they inevitably launch into some theory of justice or moral desert or human rights, which invariably fails to account for the contours of the law. After all, attempting to batter someone is morally blameworthy whether or not the intended victim is aware of it, and one hardly has the right not to be offended.
The students fail because they think of the law as created by conscious human agency to serve an intended end. Thus, they miss the simpler evolutionary explanation. In earlier centuries, one of the most urgent social needs was to reduce the level of violence in society. This meant discouraging people from taking the kind of actions that were likely to provoke an immediate violent response. Quite naturally, then, when disputes arising out of violent clashes were settled, the resolutions tended to penalize those who had taken such actions. But what type of actions are these? Direct physical attacks on one’s person are obviously included. But affronts to one’s dignity or other attacks on one’s honor are equally if not more likely to provoke violence. Hence, the law of battery evolved to forbid not merely harmful contacts, but offensive ones as well. Furthermore, an attack that failed was just as likely to provoke violence as one that succeeded, and thus gave rise to liability. But if the intended victim was not aware of the attack, it could not provoke a violent response, and if the threat was not immediate, the threatened party had time to escape, enlist the aid of others, or otherwise respond in a nonviolent manner. Hence, the law of assault evolved to forbid only threats of immediate battery of which the target was aware.
This example shows how the common law creates the rules necessary for a peaceful society with minimal infringement upon individual freedom. Law that arises from the settlement of actual conflicts, settles conflicts. It does not create a mechanism for social control. Common law is law that is created by non-political forces.

In this perspective, in the same way that the law can and should develop spontaneously, in order to provide order without rulers, it would seem natural to explain moral rules as the spontaneous result of human life and culture.