Leaving Anhedonia

Expanded Study of Elizabeth Anderson's "If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?" (re-posted with some new edits, 12-21-19)

An expanded study, from an earlier post, of Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”

Anderson presents a critique of the proposition that without the notion of God people will turn to a life of immorality and nihilism.

For it is argued by many that without a belief in God, the world won't have a healthy fear of divine punishment and embrace an "anything goes" approach to life.

Thomas Hobbes is famous for making that claim that without fear of God and retribution from the state the masses would be reduced to barbarian hordes sending society into a state of lawless anarchy. 

Many religious people make a similar claim: We need God to give us a moral foundation, and without this foundation, we will dissolve into chaos, anarchy, and anything goes. God is the author of morality, according to this logic. In the absence of God, we have no morality.

But as someone mentioned on Reddit, there is an opposite approach. The person writes the following comment:

A pretty great read. It touches on Euthyphro's dilemma.

"This objection is as old as philosophy. Plato, the first systematic philosopher, raised it against divine command theories of morality in the fifth century BCE. He asked divine-command moralists: are actions right because God commands them, or does God command them because they are right? If the latter is true, then actions are right indepen­dent of whether God commands them, and God is not needed to underwrite the authority of morality. But if the former is true, then 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."

Empirical Evidence May Contradict Above

Over the last three decades, I have gotten to know families, through my students, who are not explicitly religious; however, these families have moral solid values: love, loyalty, commitment, sacrifice, etc. 

It appears that family bonds generate their own kind of morality. 

Different Types of Religious People

I have seen religious people who are good and religious people who are evil. Therefore, I have doubts that religion based on a belief on God, has a monopoly on morality. 

Elizabeth Anderson Begins with the "Common Christian Argument":

Philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson begins her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”with a common Christian argument that the “evil tree” of evolution, atheism and secularism grows evil branches: “abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol,” to give a partial list.

Anderson explains that religion objects to evolution on moral grounds and that “the basic cause of this immorality is atheism.”

How do we know difference between right and wrong without a religious text?

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.”

Anderson's Claim or Thesis

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.

Does belief in hell help steer us toward moral behavior?

Anderson's 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.

Anderson sees morality as not a byproduct of religion but as a natural occurrence in any healthy society. Morality evolves to make societies more stable and cooperative.

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.”

Secular societies banned immoral behavior long before religion, according to Anderson.

People have been aware of these moral codes, Anderson observes, “long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggests 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.”

Fear of punishment and enticement through reward is inferior morality, according to Anderson.

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.

Is this true?

However, one could argue that pagan societies were not as morally robust as religious ones. For example, Elaine Pagels, who is not a religious fundamentalist, points out in her book Adam, Even and the Serpent, that in ancient societies, pagans threw unwanted babies away on the curb to be taken away in the garbage dumps while Christians did not engage in this abhorrent act. 

We should remember that Elaine Pagels is no friend of religious fundamentalism, the kind that preaches heaven and hell in the traditional sense.

Anderson claims that atheism can be just as moral as theism:

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.

Anderson claims that religion most often actually degrades morality.

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.”

Crimes of the Old and New Testament

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.”

Slavery in the Bible

The Old and New Testaments, human chronicles confined to their age, treat slavery as if it were normal and morally acceptable. If they were truly divine, some say, they would give us an unequivocal condemnation of slavery so that immoral people could not use the Bible to justify slavery. 

Anderson sees cruelty in the Bible.

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.

Different religions claim to have the "one truth":

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.”

So where does moral authority come from?

So if we have no faith in God, Anderson asks, where does moral authority come from? 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.

Anderson presents a critique of the proposition that without the notion of God people will turn to a life of immorality and nihilism.

For it is argued by many that without a belief in God, the world won't have a healthy fear of divine punishment and embrace an "anything goes" approach to life.

Thomas Hobbes is famous for making that claim that without fear of God and retribution from the state the masses would be reduced to barbarian hordes sending society into a state of lawless anarchy. 

Many religious people make a similar claim: We need God to give us a moral foundation, and without this foundation, we will dissolve into chaos, anarchy, and anything goes. God is the author of morality, according to this logic. In the absence of God, we have no morality.

But as someone mentioned on Reddit, there is an opposite approach. The person writes the following comment:

A pretty great read. It touches on Euthyphro's dilemma.

"This objection is as old as philosophy. Plato, the first systematic philosopher, raised it against divine command theories of morality in the fifth century BCE. He asked divine-command moralists: are actions right because God commands them, or does God command them because they are right? If the latter is true, then actions are right indepen­dent of whether God commands them, and God is not needed to underwrite the authority of morality. But if the former is true, then 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."

Empirical Evidence May Contradict Above

Over the last three decades, I have gotten to know families, through my students, who are not explicitly religious; however, these families have moral solid values: love, loyalty, commitment, sacrifice, etc. 

It appears that family bonds generate their own kind of morality. 

Different Types of Religious People

I have seen religious people who are good and religious people who are evil. Therefore, I have doubts that religion based on a belief on God, has a monopoly on morality. 

Elizabeth Anderson Begins with the "Common Christian Argument":

Philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson begins her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”with a common Christian argument that the “evil tree” of evolution, atheism and secularism grows evil branches: “abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol,” to give a partial list.

Anderson explains that religion objects to evolution on moral grounds and that “the basic cause of this immorality is atheism.”

How do we know difference between right and wrong without a religious text?

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.”

Anderson's Claim or Thesis

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.

Does belief in hell help steer us toward moral behavior?

Anderson's 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.

Anderson sees morality as not a byproduct of religion but as a natural occurrence in any healthy society. Morality evolves to make societies more stable and cooperative.

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.”

Secular societies banned immoral behavior long before religion, according to Anderson.

People have been aware of these moral codes, Anderson observes, “long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggests 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.”

Fear of punishment and enticement through reward is inferior morality, according to Anderson.

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.

Is this true?

However, one could argue that pagan societies were not as morally robust as religious ones. For example, Elaine Pagels, who is not a religious fundamentalist, points out in her book Adam, Even and the Serpent, that in ancient societies, pagans threw unwanted babies away on the curb to be taken away in the garbage dumps while Christians did not engage in this abhorrent act. 

We should remember that Elaine Pagels is no friend of religious fundamentalism, the kind that preaches heaven and hell in the traditional sense.

Anderson claims that atheism can be just as moral as theism:

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.

Anderson claims that religion most often actually degrades morality.

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.”

Crimes of the Old and New Testament

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.”

Slavery in the Bible

The Old and New Testaments, human chronicles confined to their age, treat slavery as if it were normal and morally acceptable. If they were truly divine, some say, they would give us an unequivocal condemnation of slavery so that immoral people could not use the Bible to justify slavery. 

Anderson sees cruelty in the Bible.

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.

Different religions claim to have the "one truth":

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.”

So where does moral authority come from?

So if we have no faith in God, Anderson asks, where does moral authority come from? 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.

Appraising the Four Approaches to Life: Sensuous Nihilist, Theistic Moralist, Secular Moralist, & Mindless Consumer

How many of us navigate through this world with a conscious worldview that we’ve honed, sculpted, and revised like a work of art? How many of us navigate blindly on some default setting, habits of family, habits of culture, habits of our genetic hard-wiring, habits of “bread and circus”?

Perhaps I oversimplify here, but it seems there are three worldviews, which account for three ways of living one’s life. A fourth way is not based on a consciously constructed worldview but is so prevalent it must be included here, so I want to make a comparison of the Four Approaches to Life:

Approach One: The Sensual Nihilist 

This person rejects conventional morality, religion, appearances, and the need for societal approval. He is “his own man,” free to live according to his own tastes and dictates. He is embodied in many ways by the narrator of Steely Dan’s masterpiece “Deacon Blues.” But to be warned, this narrator is hardly lionized by the band’s writers. As we read in Marc Myers’ Wall Street Journal article, “How Steely Dan Created ‘Deacon Blues,’” the narrator is somewhat of a delusional mediocrity who imagines living the life of a melancholy, depressive saxophone player who gets drunk, has illicit affairs, and seems to feed off his self-pity. Regardless of the narrator’s alleged virtues and vices and regardless of his reliability of his own professed self-description, he embodies the Sensual Nihilist. 

I have to confess when I fell in love with “Deacon Blues” as a sixteen-year-old, the song spoke to me. The song made it clear that this world is, to borrow from comedian George Carlin, “a freak show,” and all we can do is “be ourselves,” “be true to ourselves,” discard this cursed planet, and console ourselves with our art, our music, and our sensuality.  

Problems with Approach One:

The Sensual Nihilist is appealing to me today, even late in life, but I have to confess I see several problems and limitations. For one, the Sensual Nihilist abandons the world and gives in to narcissistic indifference to others’ suffering. He is only centered on his own melancholy, which becomes in part his drug, which he feeds with sad music (if we stick to the “Deacon Blues’” narrator). 

Secondly, the consolations of melancholy and a self cut off from the world seems to have a bad ending. The depression will get worse and worse. The romantic self-image that begins the journey will disintegrate into bitterness, addiction, and irrelevance.

Third, I’m thinking of the Old Testament story of Jonah, the man who isolates himself in the body of a giant sea creature. Perhaps we can call this the Jonah Effect. When we isolate ourselves in the consolations of our own melancholy, we live too much inside our head. Solipsism results, and solipsism is the mother of craziness. 

Finally, my guess is that the Sensual Nihilist may be appealing to a juvenile, but it lacks gravitas, nuance, and realism as one tries to be an adult and embrace responsibilities. 

Final Verdict:

The Sensual Nihilist is tempting, for who doesn’t want to be a selfish narcissist who pleases himself in accordance to his whims and self-indulgences with no accountability to others or to God? Sounds delicious. Where can I sign up?

But in all seriousness, I’d be a fraud if I really said I believe in the Sensual Nihilist with all my mind, heart and soul.

Do I have any second thoughts? In fact, I do. What about the Sensual Nihilist who lives by a decency code? He does “his thing,” but he has a code of integrity and decency toward others. Such a person would a modification of the Sensual Nihilist. 

I’ll have to think further upon this archetype. 

Approach Two: The Theistic Moralist

The Theistic Moralist is grounded in a monotheistic tradition like Viktor Frankl, who in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning frames his moral worldview from his Judaic upbringing and uses Christian imagery to encourage “taking up our cross” and learning to embrace suffering in order to face life’s challenges. 

There are also who have given arduous thought and struggle to their Christian faith to build a moral framework. I’m thinking of Timothy Keller who comes across as a thoughtful, well-grounded Christian in Peter Wehner’s Atlantic article “The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller.” Keller has pastored for decades in both rural and urban environments, and he has struggled deeply to merge his intellectual grasp of his faith with his spiritual senses. 

Another Christian who strikes me as a thinking person’s Christian is Jerry Walls, author of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking Things That Matter Most. With admirable ardor and intellect, Walls attempts to reconcile a loving god with the hell doctrine. I should also say Timothy Keller has some compelling points about hell in his essay, “The Importance of Hell.”

Another thoughtful Christian who has written one of my favorite books ever about death and the afterlife is Dale Allison, author of Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things. Allison has serious questions about the morality of conventional or orthodox notions of eternal hell, which I have posted in the following: Post-Mortem Torture, Part 1, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 2, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 3, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 4, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 5, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 6, Post-Mortem Torture, Part 7. 

Advantages of Moral Theism

Clearly, if you believe in your god, you can look forward to spending eternity with your Maker after you die.

If you take your faith seriously, you have a plan to get you out of your default setting for navel gazing and other selfish pursuits. 

If you’re afraid of hell, like many of us are, you have the assurance of salvation (hopefully). 

Disadvantages of Moral Theism

You have to deal with the notion of religious monopoly. Who gets to say which religion has the Truth? Who gets to say which interpretation of which religion gets the Truth? 

Once you start back pedaling on odious doctrines and replace literalism with metaphor, where happens to your text? Do you become a universalist hippy? Are you swimming in the warm bath waters of feel-good religion without being truly challenged? How do you find the sweet spot between literalism and metaphor? 

I've gone over the pros and cons of being a Christian in an earlier post. Notably, I was thinking of my own "Christian story," what I call the Alfred North Whitehead Effect. In one of Whitehead's lectures, published in his book, Religion in the Making, he wrote: “Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality.”

Final Verdict (or not)

I don’t have the luxury of casually pursuing these questions because I am one of those types of souls who fears hell. I have dreams that are hell-like, that feel like evidence of hell. I can imagine hell. 

Approach Three: The Secular Moralist

A secular moralist believes that morality exists in truth, the truth of democracy, the truth of societies built on evolution, the truth of societies flourishing through moral reciprocity. 

You might be a vegan and animal activist like Wayne Hsiung. 

You might be a champion of liberal democracy like philosopher Martin Haaglund, author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. 

You might be a religious skeptic like philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, author of “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” I wrote a study of this essay for my blog. 

Such a moralist doesn’t need a god. He or she needs to be accountable to others. 

Advantages of the Secular Moralist

You don’t rely on some outside entity to rescue you. You don’t have to preach eternal hell. You don’t have to rely on a blood sacrifice. You don’t have to demonize people with different religious beliefs. 

Disadvantages of the Secular Moralist

Very few people without the carrots and sticks of religion will have the motivation to cultivate morality on the scale of a political or human rights activist. 

We lack the security and comfort of a spiritual blueprint to determine our thoughts and actions. 

We put too much reliance on science to explain mystery, enchantment, spiritual purity, and spiritual dissolution. 

Not enough emphasis on the soul, the care of the soul, the sickness of the soul, and health of the soul. Jesus applies appropriate emphasis on the soul. Of course, so does Judaism. 

 

Final Verdict (or not)

Without a sense of hell insurance, a variation of Pascal’s Wager, it’s hard for someone who’s been imprinted with fear of hell and condemnation of sin to find spiritual freedom and self-realization as a Secular Moralist. 

The Mindless Consumer

You have no philosophy. Reflexively, you follow society’s script to define yourself by the things you buy. You are vain, narcissistic, and soulless. Your bliss is short-lived. You have no awareness of your shallowness and misery. The disadvantages are self-evident. 

The Good News and the Bad News

The good news is that I have clarified the four approaches to life. The bad news is that I’m still agnostic about the three viable philosophies. I have much work to do. Like I said, my troubled and frightened soul doesn’t feel I have the luxury of being wrong. 

Timothy Keller Defines Hell in Part as Spiritual Dissolution

The “Deacon Blues” Credo

This morning I was reading Peter Wehner’s The Atlantic article “The Moral Universe of Timothy Keller,” described as “one of the most consequential figures in American Christianity,” and I found myself, in spite of reading many books skeptical of religion, notably books that argued that Paul was a fraud, a mountebank, and a self-serving “adventurer,” to be an evangelist with appeal. He seemed smart, decent, and experienced in the nuances of religion, a pastor who gave his life in rural and urban communities. He also struck me as someone who after much arduous struggle became grounded and whole in his faith.  

Because one of my stumbling blocks of the Christian faith is the doctrine of eternal hell, I did a Google search: “Timothy Keller eternal hell,” and I came across one of Keller’s essays, “The Importance of Hell” in which Keller gives these following defenses of this controversial doctrine: 

One, Jesus warned us of hell over and over, and he described hell as the greatest catastrophe that could happen. Hell was separation from God’s love, and this separation was our own choosing. In this version of hell, we are not so much judged as we are victims of our own love of sin and our stubborn refusal to repent of our sins. 

Two, Keller asserts that understanding hell helps us understand our dependence on God. To disappear into hell is to stubbornly refuse that such a dependence exists.

Three, hell teaches us the psychology of self-feeding blindness and self-feeding evil. The more we turn from God, the worse it gets. Separation from God is not a stagnant condition. It is progressive, or degenerative. 

Four, through hell we can understand the depth of Jesus’ love for us. 

As I read the essay, I felt condemned because in my heart I know I treasure living for myself. To illustrate what I mean by this, I need to refer to a beloved song from my teen years. It is the famous “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. I was sixteen when I first heard this song, and like many I was struck my beauty and melancholy of it. And like many, I identified with the sad sack narrator, a lonesome depressive who slithers through the streets in despair but consoles himself with his musical ability. As an amateur pianist, I was smitten with the Deacon Blues Credo: “I can’t make sense of this shitty world, so I’ll just be my own person, live my life with narcissistic indifference to the world’s problems, and glean whatever beauty I can from melancholy, sensuality, self-pity, and any other trinkets life has to offer.” We could categorize the narrator as a Sensual Nihilist, and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit this orientation has a certain appeal to me. But let us bear in mind that according to a Wall Street Journal interview the writers, the narrator was not a hero of any kind, but a mediocrity imagining himself to be a tormented artist. Secondly, a selfish sensualist who abstains from responsibility will for a time feel like he is being “true to himself” and take comfort in his isolated routine, but over time, I have to imagine this person will rot into a state of depression and confront what Viktor Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.” 

My guess is that the sensual nihilist carves out what feels like his own personal paradise in the beginning, but that over time this paradise degenerates into a kind of hell. 

On a more general level, the idea of hell as being an accurate depiction of people’s moral and spiritual dissolution speaks to me. I see people all the time succumb to greed, self-aggrandizement, lust, and other addictions. I see this in myself with my own idolatry: wristwatches, gadgets, status, comfort, etc. 

I must say I have had dreams about my own spiritual dissolution and a withdrawal into my worst behaviors that have painted me as a man isolated inside my own hell. 

I can think of two dreams to be precise. One, which I had about five years ago, showed me looking at myself in the mirror. I barely recognized my face, a joyless, tired visage with lifeless eyes. I get like this after prying myself from my computer screen. 

A second dream, which I had about two years ago, was more explicit: I was in the depths of hell and trying to climb upward along a steep jagged gulley. It was dark, and I was holding a tablet, part primordial stone and part electronic iPad. One side of the tablet was a screen depiction of all my most depraved sins. The other side of the tablet was the face of Christ. If I focused on the Jesus side, I could climb out of the chasm. 

You don’t have to convince me that hell exists as both a metaphor and as a way of describing a damned psychological state.

Where the hell doctrine gets tricky is when we talk about the following:

One. Hell as judgement from God, a sentence imposed upon us against our will.

Two. Hell as eternal with no hope of redemption.

Three. Hell as a place that gives the saved fodder for their entertainment, an infamous notion popularized by Thomas Aquinas. 

Christian Universalists reject such notions of hell. I have read Christian universalist polemics by Bradley Jersak (Her Gates Will Never Be Shut), Sharon L. Baker (Razing Hell), David Bentley (That All Shall be Saved), and Jens Reuter (My Hope in Hell). 

There are two other books that I need to mention that tackle the doctrine of hell. I am somewhat obsessed with them. One is by Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in which Walls lays out four types of Christian positions on hell:

One. Calvinism, predestination of a limited elect.

Two. Arminianism, free will with a limited number of saved and many who by their free will must go to eternal hell.

Three. “Arminianism Plus,”  a term I give to Jerry Walls' book: free will but the possibility of postmortem conversion and salvation evidencing God's more bountiful love and grace than evidenced in the two forms above. 

Four. Universalism, the belief that God's love makes it inevitable that all will be saved either in this world or the world to come. While Universalism is the most desirable, it is no panacea as many will feel nothing is at stake if they're going to be eventually to be saved "no matter what" and this can lead to problems as we can see in this City of God post about a pastor who ran into huge problems when he preached universalism. 

I went back to a blog post about my reading of Wall’s book, and I wrote the following, including a reference to “Deacon Blues.” I’ll include it here with some added headings:

Hell is a hardened heart, more than a judgment:

Walls suggests that we can acclimate to our self-made hell from our ever-hardening heart.

Walls rejects the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement:

Like Talbott, Bradley Jersak, Sharon Baker, and C.S. Lewis, Walls seems to reject the “penal substitutionary” theory of atonement, which I have always found so primitive and odious. As Walls explains it: “This is the view that Christ was punished in our place and thereby satisfied the justice and wrath of God, allowing us to be forgiven.”

The death on the Cross, for C.S. Lewis, is more of a radical response to the human race’s propensity for digging a hole and going their own way. I’m thinking of the Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues” in which the narrator romanticizes a life of hedonism, drinking, depression, and nihilism( how I love that song).

But to be in the presence of God requires spiritual perfection:

For Lewis, only a perfect person like Christ could repent perfectly and this perfect repentance is what we need to unite with God. We can only go through the perfect surrender to God if God becomes man.

This is a fascinating if not creative interpretation of the death on the Cross. I’m sympathetic to it though it doesn’t cancel my understanding that the Cross is about a sacrifice to sacrifice a God who is compelled to burn us forever otherwise. But such imprinting inside me may be, tragically, a Straw Man God. I really struggle with this.

The other book that I am obsessed with Dale C. Allison’s Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and The Last Things. Here is a blog post I wrote a few years ago about my reading of Night Comes (new headings):

Struggling with Hell Doctrine

I’ve been afraid of hell since 1979. Part of my struggle, as someone who fears hell, is reconciling the God of unconditional love with the God of eternal wrath. Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert, whom I admire very much, defines hell as eternal separation from God’s unconditional love.

My problem is that I see God doing the separating. He gives us a chance to come to Him in this world, as orthodox Christianity tells us, and when we choose to go our own way, we choose the hell of our own aloneness. In this regard, hell isn’t the eternal blowtorch singing flesh for eternity as depicted in Medieval art, but a form of self-induced solipsism: We’re left alone inside our head, our Kingdom of the Self, and such a kingdom is in a constant state of rotting.

In Chapter Five of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, he tackles the question of hell and his struggle to reconcile a belief in hell with a loving God. As I wrote in Part I, Allison is part of a growing number of liberal Christians who have an undying “antipathy” against the doctrine of eternal damnation.

One of the most devastating passages in Chapter 5 is how the hell doctrine upturned the lives of fifteenth century Japanese converts to Christianity. These pious Japanese Christians, who converted at the hands of Jesuit missionaries, lived the rest of their lives obedient to Christ, but not in a state of joy; rather, they lived in torment and anguish over the belief that their relatives had perished in the bowels of hell. Their despair was recorded by Saint Francis Xavier. As Allison quotes:

“One of the things that most pains and torments these Japanese is, that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut, so that there is no egress therefrom. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents and relatives, and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope, any way to free them by prayer from that eternal misery, and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. Their grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow. But there is this good thing about their trouble—it makes one hope that they will all be the more laborious for their own salvation, lest they, like their forefathers, should be condemned to everlasting punishment. They often ask if God cannot take their fathers out of hell, and why their punishment must never have an end. We gave them a satisfactory answer, but they did not cease to grieve over the misfortune of their relatives; and I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing men so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done with and can never be undone.”

Perhaps more than anything I’ve ever read, these words by St. Francis, quoted in Chapter 5 of Dale Allison’s Night Comes, explain my sorrow and despair at learning about Christianity at 17, converting, and then grieving over my Jewish grandmother who had recently passed away of leukemia. You will read numerous such accounts of Christians in such despair, chronicled in universalist Christian Sharon Baker’s book Razing Hell (reviewed here) or orthodox Christian and comedian Thor Ramsey’s The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever. In the latter book, Ramsey explains he doesn’t know if his deceased mother made it to heaven or not, but regardless the doctrine of eternal hell is essential for honoring and glorifying God.

I struggle to find any glory or honor here. Reading about those pious Japanese converts forever grieving, I see no joy in Christianity, no good news. The only purpose in life is to escape hell. All the good things to be said about Christianity get eclipsed by the horrors of perdition, and I share the sadness of those Japanese converts. This sadness is so great in magnitude the only word I can think of is anhedonia, the name in this blog. 

Christ calls us to preach the gospel to the ends of the Earth. In obedience, I could preach, but there would be no joy to share, only sorrow for living in a universe created by the God who does the things described in Xavier Francis’ letter quoted above.

As a college student, I joined Campus Crusade for Christ and shared biblical tracts with other students, but I had no joy in me. I was miserable, and my misery made me feel guilty. I grieved too much like those Japanese converts.

For me the crisis of faith behind this grieving is the crisis of trust. We are called to trust in God. But this grief is accompanied by intense distrust. As I read on a liberal Christian's blog many months ago, the relationship between a believer and the Hell God is too often like that of an abused child and an abusive parent. One can be submissive in these circumstances, but there is no trust, there is no love.

What is left is a term I learned reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning when you feel trapped and boxed in. The word is meetzrayim. My biggest prayer is to experience God not as the entity who traps me and boxes me in, not as the oppressor, but as the liberator. I long to experience God the way Viktor Frankl did. As he writes after being liberated from the concentration camp and watching some of his comrades succumb to nihilism:

"One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks' jubilation and freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky--and then I went down on the my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world--I had but one sentence in mind--always the same: 'I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.'

How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until again became a human being."

Frankl does not lament, like those Japanese converts, that his wife and family who perished in the Holocaust were in eternal hell. Such a scenario does not exist in his theology. Frankl experiences God without that noose of hell around his God's neck. 

This is my struggle. This is my impetus for reading books such as the brilliant one, Night Comes, by Dale Allison.

Timothy Keller’s words challenge us:

But I’m back to Timothy Keller’s defense of hell. The process of “going to hell” is accurate as Jesus says. I’ve seen it in my life. I’ve seen it in my dreams.

The struggle continues. 

Is There WiFi in Dante's Inferno?

If heaven and hell exist, it would be helpful for those of us struggling with the big theological questions if these afterlife inhabitants could post their experiences on Instagram and Facebook. Who would have the most followers, someone blissed out in paradise or someone chronicling his agony in hell? 

On a related note, I imagine in the deepest rung of Dante's Inferno, there is no WiFi. Perhaps those posts would only exist in the Dark Web. 

Does God Have to Torture His Son In Order to Forgive?

Bart Erhman in his blog asks the question: What kind of God has to torture his son in order to forgive others? He writes:

The idea that God had to subject his son to humiliation and pain by having him tortured to death for the sake of others – what kind of barbarian idea is that?   What would anyone today think if I told you that in order for me to forgive you for something you had done against me (say, lied about me; spread malicious gossip about me; stolen from me; physically abused me), in order for me to make things right between us, I had to have my son maliciously tortured and bloodily murdered?  *Then* I could forgive you.  You would think I was literally nuts. The idea that God required a bloody sacrifice of an innocent man in order to forgive others is deeply disturbing to me, now.

As a teen trying to embrace the Christian faith, I was always repulsed by the orthodox doctrine of the Crucifixion and this disgust made it difficult for me to be happy like the other "born agains" at my church. It's taken years for me to see the barbaric qualities of much that passes for orthodox faith. 

Surprised That My Critical Thinking Students Supported Elizabeth Anderson's Refutation of Biblical Piety

I assumed my critical thinking students would shy away from Elizabeth Anderson's "If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?" However, my assumptions were proven wrong. One student supported Anderson's claim that religion is a facade for bullying behavior as she chronicled some religious neighbors who persistently knock on neighborhood doors to proselytize, to the annoyance of the neighborhood, their brand of religion. 

One student, from Hungary, said to the class during the lecture day that her family was not religious but that her parents were very moral, and that her morality came from her family. She appeared to have no need for religion. 

Most surprising was a student who hardly strikes me as a theology expert write in her essay that she finds the doctrine of the Crucifixion offensive, that such a doctrine evidences a God of rage who is driven by revenge. I've read such accounts of Christianity from Christian universalists such as Bradley Jersak and Sharon Baker who, like my student, are also offended by the convention interpretation of the Crucifixion. 

I feared my writing option for the final would be shunned, but instead close to a dozen students wrote eloquently on a subject that I could tell means a lot to them. I stand surprised. I'm equally surprised I had no religious students who decided to take on Anderson.

With all the talk about how we are a soulless consumer culture, I find myself bearing witness to a lot of people who care about the matter of God, morality, and authenticity. 

Study of Andrew Sullivan’s “America’s New Religions,” Part 3: Sullivan Blames Religious Decline on Trump Cult

Andrew Sullivan argues that the thirst for religion in the absence of religion will find misguided expression because we are all by nature religious, and he argues that the Trump Cult, a grotesque religion of its own kind, is a response to the decline of Christianity.

For Sullivan, Christianity is not a cult of groupthink; rather, this religion values “the primacy of the individual.” As we read:

And so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults. Like almost all new cultish impulses, they see no boundary between politics and their religion. And both cults really do minimize the importance of the individual in favor of either the oppressed group or the leader.

And this is how they threaten liberal democracy. They do not believe in the primacy of the individual, they believe the ends justify the means, they do not allow for doubt or reason, and their religious politics can brook no compromise. They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself — as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood.

While I agree with Sullivan’s assessment of the Trump Cult, I find religion, and Christianity specifically, to be too diverse, to lump it all as a force that champions the individual. There may be some brands of it that perform this function, but many, as history shows us, do not.

I’m struggling even more with Sullivan when he makes the claim that Christianity is responsible for promoting individualism and liberalism:

It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing it. It was on these foundations that liberalism was built, and it is by these foundations it has endured. The question we face in contemporary times is whether a political system built upon such a religion can endure when belief in that religion has become a shadow of its future self.

Again, Christianity is no monolith. The Christianity of John Calvin doesn’t resemble the Christianity of Rufus Jones or Marcus Borg. It may be true that “religion has become a shadow of its future self,” but Sullivan hasn’t convinced me of the premise of his argument, so much of what he claims afterward is not persuasive.

I agree with Sullivan that our nation is in crisis due to tribalism, but to say that the absence of Christianity, the kind that Sullivan embraces, is the root of our country’s divisiveness is not compelling. White evangelicals who support the Trump cult are scary. They interpret their religion the way people have always interpreted religions: in diverse and in often dangerous ways.

I am now looking forward to reading Ezra Klein’s critique of Sullivan’s essay.

Study of Andrew Sullivan’s “America’s New Religions,” Part 2: Both Vox Liberals and White Evangelicals Are Afflicted With Banality

Sullivan argues that without God we are left aching for something more as our soul’s remain essentially empty. Fundamentally, we feel alone. As Sullivan writes:

But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species. Gray recounts the experiences of two extraordinarily brilliant nonbelievers, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, who grappled with this deep problem. Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:

“I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”

At that point, this architect of our liberal order, this most penetrating of minds, came to the conclusion: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” It took a while for him to recover.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl makes similar points. We must have a purpose to slog through life’s indignities with a sense of dignity. Sullivan wants to remind us that absent a deity it can be tough going.

Sullivan then observes that we try to distract ourselves from our loneliness and emptiness through consumer culture and endless entertainments. Nothing new here. The French philosopher Pascal made similar observations.

Sullivan then takes a shot at Vox:

But the banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper. Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality.

“Explainers” for Vox are social justice warriors and empty and banal ones at that. This does strike me as an unfair and over simplistic, perhaps even unprovoked and gratuitous, shot from Sullivan. But I assume Sullivan has some animus against Vox and its brand of liberalism.

Then Sullivan pivots to America, without Christianity, turning politics into a religious substitute and with bad results, creating a catastrophe that we have before us with a sociopath in the White House.

In one somewhat incohesive paragraph, Sullivan disdains Vox liberals and white evangelicals. He conflates the smug absence of faith with Vox acolytes with the empty piety of white evangelicals. In Sullivan’s view, both are frauds, but the latter frauds have erected a monster “demigod” who is destroying America.

Study of Andrew Sullivan’s “America’s New Religions,” Part 1: Does Everyone Have a Religion?

Recently, Ezra Klein took Andrew Sullivan to task for the latter’s essay “America’s New Religions.” Klein makes the claim that Sullivan is guilty of the very tribalism and moral blindness he condemns in his essay. To see if this is true, I’m going to do a study of both essays.

Sullivan begins by making the claim that we all have a religion, an animating force that makes us tick. The atheist is just as driven by his atheistic religion as the Christian is his. Is this true? I suppose we can make this claim, but only if we have an overly broad definition of religion.

Is the mindless consumer religious? If you define “mindless consumerism” as religion, then I suppose you could make this claim. But such a definition is so broad as to be meaningless. However, I find merit in Sullivan’s deeper point: Most of us are in search for belonging and purpose and this search compels us to find a tribe or a brand that defines our identity.

Another persuasive point Sullivan makes is that how we interpret events to find meaning defines our religious point of view. Sullivan writes:

In his highly entertaining book, The Seven Types of Atheism, released in October in the U.S., philosopher John Gray puts it this way: “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.

This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning. Art can provide an escape from the deadliness of our daily doing, but, again, appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life.

Sullivan goes on to explain that while he loved Christopher Hitchens’ critique of biblical literalism, such a critique does not refute the spiritual lessons we gain from reading scriptures metaphorically. There are spiritual and psychological truths to be found in scriptures. These biblical stories speak to us and explain our human condition of torment and our need for guidelines, boundaries, and moral constraints. Otherwise, we will fall prey to moral dissolution. So far nothing controversial.

But Sullivan’s next point is more ambitious. He makes the claim that we live in a post-Christian world where Christian virtues have been replaced by a grotesque religion of unbridled capitalism and materialism. Secularists with their naive faith in the narrative of human progress, as chronicled so well in John Gray’s The Seven Types of Atheism, is but a chimera. For Sullivan, Steven Pinker’s salvation in human reason is a dangerous canard. Christianity, on the other hand, warns us of the soul’s inclination for self-destruction. Reason has its limits as our minds are muddled by our fleshly instincts. Further, even if reason achieves our material goals, we are left haunted souls thirsting for meaning.

Sullivan seems to be arguing that we need an absolute as far as meaning goes to achieve any kind of happiness. But I’m not so sure. Meaning is not absolute. Many of us crave musical and artistic beauty and the spiritual contentment of knowing we have integrity. But I’m not so sure these things are absolute conditions of meaning that can be poured into the vase of a religious doctrine.

Another way we fill the "spiritual vacuum," as Viktor Frankl calls it, is find something related to meaning: connection. Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving observes how we are anxious until we find connection and oneness with other human beings, sometimes through "orgiastic states."

For Quaker writer Rufus Jones, absolute meaning is a connection with God. As he writes in his book Fundamental Ends of Life:

But there is nevertheless in our world a nucleus of real intrinsic religion—religion in spirit and in truth—which seeks God, as the artist seeks beauty, as the lover seeks the beloved, as the saint seeks holiness, for no ulterior and extrinsic purpose, solely to find Him and to worship Him and to love Him and to be like Him. Religion, when it comes to its full glory and “merges” from the complex forms that have gone under the name of “religion” is a fundamental end of life. It attaches to an ultimate reality. It seeks, finds and enjoys a great Companion, a loving Friend, a tender Father. It has its ground and basis in the essential nature of the soul of man . . .

I'm convinced of the sincerity of Rufus Jones' experience and of its implications. However, I’m also skeptical of many who claim they have found absolute meaning. Unlike Rufus Jones, they are too often bullies or delusional or fanatics or all of the above.

Curiosity about life and a reverence for life can be powerful life forces, but they are not the equivalent of finding absolute meaning.

It is at this point that perhaps Andrew Sullivan is committing an over simplification. But we will explore this further.

Study of Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” with Counterarguments

I reworked this material in an updated essay, "Does Belief in God Compromise Our Morality?"

An expanded study of Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”

Hobbes's idea of the need for religious fear to control the masses

Many religious people claim that without a belief in God, the world won't have a healthy fear of divine punishment and embrace an "anything goes" approach to life.

Thomas Hobbes is famous for making that claim that without fear of God and retribution from the state the masses would be reduced to barbarian hordes sending society into a state of lawless anarchy. 

Is God the moral source? Without faith in God, do we throw morality out the window?

"There is no god, man. I do whatever I can get away with. Ha!"

Many religious people make a similar claim: We need God to give us a moral foundation, and that without this foundation, we will dissolve into chaos, anarchy, and anything goes. God is the author of morality, according to this logic. In the absence of God, we have no morality.

Empirical Evidence May Contradict Above

Over the last three decades, I have gotten to know families, through my students, who are not explicitly religious; however, these families have strong moral values: love, loyalty, commitment, sacrifice, etc. 

It appears that family bonds generate their own kind of morality. 

Different Types of Religious People

I have seen religious people who are good and religious people who are evil. Therefore, I have doubts that religion based on a belief on God, has a monopoly on morality. 

Elizabeth Anderson Begins with the "Common Christian Argument":

Philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson begins her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”with a common Christian argument that the “evil tree” of evolution, atheism and secularism grows evil branches: “abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol,” to give a partial list.

Anderson explains that religion objects to evolution on moral grounds and that “the basic cause of this immorality is atheism.”

How do we know difference between right and wrong without a religious text?

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.”

Anderson's Claim or Thesis

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.

Does belief in hell help steer us toward moral behavior?

Anderson's 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.

Anderson sees morality as not a byproduct of religion but as a natural occurrence in any healthy society. Morality evolves to make societies more stable and cooperative.

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.”

Counterargument to Anderson:

Don't we know people who without any kind of faith or ideology live a life of emptiness in which all they do is worship money and engage in rabid consumerism, endeavors that fail to make them happy? Is learning to "get along" with our fellow humans enough "morality," as Anderson claims, to fill the spiritual void?

 

Secular societies banned immoral behavior long before religion, according to Anderson.

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.”

Fear of punishment and enticement through reward is inferior morality, according to Anderson.

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.

Is this true?

Counterargument: Ancients and Value of Life

However, one could argue that pagan societies were not as morally robust as religious ones. For example, Elaine Pagels, who is not a religious fundamentalist, points out in her book Adam, Even and the Serpent, that in ancient societies, pagans threw unwanted babies away on the curb to be taken away in the garbage dumps while Christians did not engage in this abhorrent act. 

We should remember that Elaine Pagels is no friend of religious fundamentalism, the kind that preaches heaven and hell in the traditional sense.

Anderson claims that atheism can be just as moral as theism:

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.

Anderson claims that religion most often actually degrades morality by presenting punishments and rewards.

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.”

Crimes of the Old and New Testament

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.”

Slavery in the Bible

The Old and New Testaments, human chronicles confined to their age, treat slavery as if it were normal and morally acceptable. If they were truly divine, some say, they would give us an unequivocal condemnation of slavery so that immoral people could not use the Bible to justify slavery. 

Anderson sees cruelty in the Bible.

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.

Counterargument

Is Anderson taking biblical literalists or fundamentalists who represent the worst religion has to offer and asking us to take them for all religious people? And if she is, is she committing a Straw Man fallacy?

Different religions claim to have the "one truth":

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.”

So where does moral authority come from?

So if we have no faith in God, Anderson asks, where does moral authority come from? 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.

 

Hobbes's idea of the need for religious fear to control the masses

Many religious people claim that without a belief in God, the world won't have a healthy fear of divine punishment and embrace an "anything goes" approach to life.

Thomas Hobbes is famous for making that claim that without fear of God and retribution from the state the masses would be reduced to barbarian hordes sending society into a state of lawless anarchy. 

Is God the moral source? Without faith in God, do we throw morality out the window?

"There is no god, man. I do whatever I can get away with. Ha!"

Many religious people make a similar claim: We need God to give us a moral foundation, and that without this foundation, we will dissolve into chaos, anarchy, and anything goes. God is the author of morality, according to this logic. In the absence of God, we have no morality.

Empirical Evidence May Contradict Above

Over the last three decades, I have gotten to know families, through my students, who are not explicitly religious; however, these families have strong moral values: love, loyalty, commitment, sacrifice, etc. 

It appears that family bonds generate their own kind of morality. 

Different Types of Religious People

I have seen religious people who are good and religious people who are evil. Therefore, I have doubts that religion based on a belief on God, has a monopoly on morality. 

Elizabeth Anderson Begins with the "Common Christian Argument":

Philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson begins her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”with a common Christian argument that the “evil tree” of evolution, atheism and secularism grows evil branches: “abortion, suicide, homosexuality, the drug culture, hard rock, alcohol,” to give a partial list.

Anderson explains that religion objects to evolution on moral grounds and that “the basic cause of this immorality is atheism.”

How do we know difference between right and wrong without a religious text?

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.”

Anderson's Claim or Thesis

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.

Does belief in hell help steer us toward moral behavior?

Anderson's 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.

Anderson sees morality as not a byproduct of religion but as a natural occurrence in any healthy society. Morality evolves to make societies more stable and cooperative.

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.”

Counterargument to Anderson:

Don't we know people who without any kind of faith or ideology live a life of emptiness in which all they do is worship money and engage in rabid consumerism, endeavors that fail to make them happy? Is learning to "get along" with our fellow humans enough "morality," as Anderson claims, to fill the spiritual void?

 

Secular societies banned immoral behavior long before religion, according to Anderson.

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.”

Fear of punishment and enticement through reward is inferior morality, according to Anderson.

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.

Is this true?

Counterargument: Ancients and Value of Life

However, one could argue that pagan societies were not as morally robust as religious ones. For example, Elaine Pagels, who is not a religious fundamentalist, points out in her book Adam, Even and the Serpent, that in ancient societies, pagans threw unwanted babies away on the curb to be taken away in the garbage dumps while Christians did not engage in this abhorrent act. 

We should remember that Elaine Pagels is no friend of religious fundamentalism, the kind that preaches heaven and hell in the traditional sense.

Anderson claims that atheism can be just as moral as theism:

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.

Anderson claims that religion most often actually degrades morality by presenting punishments and rewards.

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.”

Crimes of the Old and New Testament

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.”

Slavery in the Bible

The Old and New Testaments, human chronicles confined to their age, treat slavery as if it were normal and morally acceptable. If they were truly divine, some say, they would give us an unequivocal condemnation of slavery so that immoral people could not use the Bible to justify slavery. 

Anderson sees cruelty in the Bible.

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.

Counterargument

Is Anderson taking biblical literalists or fundamentalists who represent the worst religion has to offer and asking us to take them for all religious people? And if she is, is she committing a Straw Man fallacy?

Different religions claim to have the "one truth":

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.”

So where does moral authority come from?

So if we have no faith in God, Anderson asks, where does moral authority come from? 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.