But this overestimates the role of ethical counsel and underestimates the social insecurity natural to almost all people. For natural selection, and the sexual discretion of individuals, preserves with greater frequency the offspring of men and women who, regardless of the values broadcast by their favorite prophets, are jealous of their reputations and worried about what other people think and say of them. People don't have to read Scripture, or anything at all, to feel that it is wrong, or inadvisable, to cheat on their spouses, or with the spouses of others. And it is not the absence of the Ten Commandments in American classrooms and public buildings that leads to increased promiscuous behavior within a community. It is the eruption of social conditions that stymie the kind of ordinary social contact which prompts that anxiety over one's own reputation natural to us all. Warfare offers the most egregious historical examples of this kind of social disruption, and you will find, during periods of social upheaval, many more people reciting their Ten Commandments who have engaged in the systematic rape and abuse of others than you will among pagans or atheists living in a stable community of wholly secular values.