When you hear someone arguing that high school shootings could be averted by prayer in schools or by posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, you'll often hear the phrase, "Christianity is the basis for morality." To say this is to say that the reason people do good is for fear of punishment. God is likened to a loving father who at times needs to reprimand his children. The father image is one we are all familiar with, one of love and strength. The twist comes when you consider the severity of the punishment, an eternity of torture in fire. If you surveyed all of humanity you would probably not find a single person who would disagree that setting fire to a child is an act of evil, the kind of evil that would make the front pages of newspapers and have angry crowds demanding justice. If a criminal in prison, someone who had committed unspeakable acts of evil, was sentenced to a life time (infinitely more lenient than an eternity) of torture as punishment , there would be protesters. Our instincts tell us that this sort of punishment is wrong and unwarranted. Why then is it so widely overlooked that Christians demand better behavior from each other than they do from their God, their shining example of goodness?

When you step back and honestly think about God, Heaven and Hell, it all seems remarkably unsophisticated and self-important. It could have been invented by any boy on any grade school playground. Try to think about the following as if you were hearing it for the first time. There is an omnipotent, invisible being (an imaginary friend, if you will) who watches your every move. Your actions are so important to this being that he will reward you with something more wonderful than you can imagine for an eternity if you're good or give you an eternal punishment straight out of a nightmare if you're bad. This is the stuff of primitive culture; the imaginings of early men who thought they were the center of the universe.  The sun and stars revolve around the Earth and man is the most important and cherished creation of an omnipotent being.  We now know that we are far from the center of the universe, one of its billions and billions of solar systems.  It is fortunate for us that out of all of the billions of planets God has created, Earth is his favorite.  There is no doubting man's egotism.

But, humanity is not a misbehaving adolescent. Morality is secular and instinctive. It evolved as a necessity for the survival of social animals' communities. It is not hard to imagine how ancient communities with an instinct for morality would survive better than communities that lacked it. The moral communities, those with instinctive rules for resolving conflicts, would grow and prosper, while the others would dwindle.  How do you have instinctive morality?  It is a precognitive gut reaction, the way you would wince if you read on the front page of the newspaper that a parent had set their child on fire.

The Closet Atheist