For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who
claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs
to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is selfsacrifice
for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the
good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one
came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your selfinterest
and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that
morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force.
Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right
or wrong in reason—that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.
