An age-old question about morality is do we need religion to motivate us to be accountable for our actions? Without a fear of God, will we succumb to self-indulgent, navel-gazing nihilism and pleasure seeking? To live life with reverence and to treat life as if it were precious is to give meaning to life. Bart Ehrman observes that Plato believed we had to act as if our actions were accountable before we faced eternity. Ehrman writes, "Everyone will have to account for how they lived," in his description of Plato's worldview in Ehrman's post "Death and the Meaning of Life."
Dale Allison in his book Night Comes states that near-death-experiences are universal and they always have a person being accountable for his own life.
Personal accountability raises the stakes and protects us from the despair of nihilism, the belief that "nothing matters."
No doubt, the appeal of religion is its powerful message that your life matters, your actions matter, you are accountable for every second you spend on planet earth.
But philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson rejects the notion that religion is a reliable guide to morality. In her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” she begins with a common Christian argument that the secular life is a life doomed to moral bankruptcy. She describes how some Christians point to the “evil tree” of evolution, atheism and secularism. Their Demon Tree grows evil branches: “abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol,” to give a partial list.
Another analogy is the Ark. To depart from the faith is to jump off the Ark. You will drown in the flood of your own sin.
Evolution leads to atheism, which is a springboard to the sinful sea, where surely you will drown.
Anderson explains that religion objects to evolution on moral grounds and that “the basic cause of this immorality is atheism.”
Theists would have us believe that in the absence of religion the world would succumb to chaos and moral dissolution. Christian apologist William Lane Craig argues that without God-ordained morality we cannot know the difference between right and wrong. Everything would be permitted. We would plummet into nihilism and decay.
Anderson shows insight in making the claim that theists have a gut hostility toward atheism, not because of solid evidence for a belief in God, but because of a conviction that “without God, morality is impossible.”
She then presents her thesis, which is that not only do we not need religion to flourish morally as a society but also that religion is too often an impediment to moral development.
Her thesis contradicts the Jesus of the Four Gospels who believed we had to love God with all our heart. Also, he encouraged us to fear eternal hell to develop our morality. Whenever we are tempted to commit an immoral act or sin, we should contemplate our rotting in hell.
Many of us have been raised to believe that following Jesus’ words are the only way to the Moral Path. Some would argue that a belief in a literal hell is for taming wild children, that as adults mature they see that immorality is its own punishment (just as virtue is its own reward). Perhaps some people are more mature than others. Some people need the fear of hell while others can mature beyond such a stick to repel them from immorality.
As Anderson explains, morality does not belong to religion; rather is a natural occurrence in any healthy secular or religious society. She writes, “Every society, whether or not it was founded on theism, has acknowledged the basic principles of morality, excluding religious observance, which are laid down in the Ten Commandments. Every stable society punishes murder, theft, and bearing false witness; teaches children to honor their parents; and condemns envy of one’s neighbor’s possessions, at least when such envy leads one to treat one’s neighbors badly.”
People have been aware of these moral codes, Anderson observes, “long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggest that moral knowledge springs not from revelation but from people’s experiences in living together, in which they have learned that they must adjust their own conduct in light of others’ claims.”
Anderson dismisses the idea that religion provides motivation for morality. The idea that people should be enticed with heavenly rewards or threatened with hell is in fact off-putting: “On this view, people must be goaded into behaving morally through divine sanction. But this can’t be right, either. People have many motives, such as love, a sense of honor, and respect for others, that motivate moral behavior.” In fact, she points out, Pagan societies are just as morally robust as religious ones.
So in fact we don’t need a “moral commander” to get our moral rules. We don’t need God to get our morality. Therefore, we cannot reject atheism on the grounds that it creates immorality.
The great turn in the essay is where Anderson explains the moralistic argument: If something leads to moral rot, we should reject it. Not only does Anderson argue that atheism does not lead to moral rot, she argues, in a big twist, that it is theism, especially organized religion from the Old and New Testaments, that creates moral abominations and catastrophes.
The God of the Bible is so full of whimsy, caprice, cruelty, tyranny and other abominations that this God can make anything appear to be good, including lots of things that are very, very bad.
Anderson writes that, “God could make any action right simply by willing it or by ordering others to do it. This establishes that, if the authority of morality depends on God’s will, then, in principle, anything is permitted.”
Anderson anticipates that theists would defend their God by saying that “God would never do anything morally reprehensible Himself, nor command us to perform heinous acts.” But Anderson will have none of us. She will devote the next portion of her essay—a rather large chunk—to detailing many heinous acts done in the name of God. She plumbs the Old Testament for all kinds of war, murder, genocides, plagues, curses, famines, infanticide, slavery, adultery-spurred stonings, and finishes one litany-laden paragraph with “This is but a sample of the evils celebrated in the Bible.”
Anderson is equally repulsed, morally, by the New Testament. She disdains Jesus’ “family values” and the doctrine of eternal damnation. Anderson is equally offended by Jesus dying for our sins and becoming the “scapegoat for humanity.” She argues that “scapegoating contradicts the whole moral principle of personal responsibility.” She is also offended that God needs to kill his son to forgive humanity. He should be able to forgive humanity “straightaway.”
Her verdict of the Bible is that it is a disgrace and an abomination. She writes, “I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the God of the Bible is cruel and unjust and commands and permits us to be cruel and unjust to others.” Here are religious doctrines that on their face claim that it is all right to mercilessly punish people for the wrongs of others and for blameless error, that license or even command murder, plunder, rape, torture, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. So we should reject the doctrines that represent them as right.”
Anderson then looks at way theists could be decent by glossing over reprehensible Bible passages and leaving fundamentalism to become liberal theists, because she concludes, “that there is no way to cabin off or soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications of these biblical passages. They must be categorically rejected as false and depraved moral teachings.” Liberal theists can reject these teachings; fundamentalists cannot.
Anderson later observes that the Bible contains good and bad passages and that the picking and the choosing depends on our moral character: “the Bible is more like a Rorschach test: which passages people choose to emphasize reflects as much as it shapes their moral character and interests.” Our beliefs, Anderson observes, are often the result of “cognitive bias” and self-interest.
Anderson is further repulsed by the biblical God’s “raw power,” which people tend to worship in fear rather than rational understanding and love. Quoting Thomas Hobbes, Anderson explains that people, including the biblical scribes, often worship “raw power” for its own sake regardless of moral considerations.
Anderson gives a personal account of an annual summer fair she attends. Many different religious people give out information in their booths. They all claim to be right while disparaging others’ beliefs. For Anderson, the major religions are no better than mountebanks L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, the Rev. Moon, Mary Baker Eddy, and others. The major religions are no more legit than “Zeus, Baal, Thor, and other long-abandoned gods, who are now considered ridiculous by nearly everyone.”
Anderson takes offense to the non credible evidence used to defend religion: “revelations, miracles, religious experiences, and prophecies, nearly all known only by testimony transmitted through uncertain chains of long-lost original sources.”
These flimsy bits of evidence, Anderson writes, “systematically generate contradictory beliefs, many of which are known to be morally abhorrent or otherwise false.”
Having definitively rejected theism, Anderson writes that we humans, not God, are responsible for moral authority. Our authority is not absolute. Rather morality is part of “reciprocal claim making, in which we work out together the kinds of considerations that count as reasons that all of us must heed, and thereby devise rules for living together peacefully and cooperatively, on a basis of mutual accountability.”
Too many people have committed atrocities in the name of God. Taking God out of the equation and making us accountable to one another as we live the Golden Rule (something theists, atheists, and Confucianists can agree on).
While I wish I had Anderson’s whole-hearted atheism and the complete lack of fearing eternal hell (a condition that must be amazing; I can only imagine my nightmares and depression might diminish) I find this essay to be one of the most cogent, persuasive essays against theism.
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