"Clean
your room or I'll light you on fire!" 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
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