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Right and Wrong Without God by William B. Lindley
Obedience—unquestioning obedience to authority with threat of punishment and promise of reward—is most people's starting point for learning right from wrong. Some have outgrown it; some haven't. We all disobey sooner or later, and sometimes even get away with it. This is a problem for parents who rely on nothing but obedience. Their solution is to inculcate in their children a belief in a nonhuman authority, a kind of supernatural baby-sitter. The children are taught that they live forever, that there is a heaven and hell, and that the accounts will be settled after they die. In other words, no behavior, good or bad, is overlooked, even though it seems like it. The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation and karma, where what you do now determines how good your next life will be, is another form of the same idea. Many come to find these ideas unbelievable. As Ingersoll put it, "I have little confidence in any... investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders." This would seem to lead independent thinkers willy-nilly to amorality, but only if obedience is the only ground for morality. There are other ways of separating right from wrong and learning to do right. Most of us were raised on a morality that includes these other ideas. Chief among these are justice and compassion. We learn through experience and guidance that fairness (equity or justice)works. At the root level, on the playground the children are happier when they play fair. Part of playing fair is honesty, and with honesty trust is possible. Compassion is a natural human sentiment, arising in real-life situations. It can be encouraged and channeled. As we grow up, our lives get richer and more complex, but these basic ideas of a good life come to be applied, and to do their good work, in the new situations. Another important concept is long-term thinking. The short-term advantage often conceals a long-term disadvantage. Most of us are taught how and why to plan ahead. The key point is that we accept responsibility as volitional agents for our behavior and its consequences. None of this comes from a morality based upon obedience alone. The so-called "Judeo-Christian" morality is, of course, based on more than obedience. Compassion is a key part of it, but Christians consider it a duty, not part of our natural humanity. Law is prominent. Justice is more elusive, with the whimsical and angry God of the Bible dispensing it. Nevertheless, objective standards of justice and compassion exist here and there within Christendom, and it would be a slander to say that all of Christianity bases its morality on obedience alone. The angry critics of freethought and of the secular society are a special case: they often argue that if people had no faith in God, there would be nothing to restrain them from doing whatever they please, no matter how vile. This argument is rooted in a morality of obedience alone. It has a small spot of truth in it. If a person is raised on obedience alone and knows no other morality, and then loses his reason for being obedient (e.g., decides that his "baby-sitter" is a fiction), he may indeed come to lack a conscience, and behave accordingly. However, there are two other ways that such a person can go wrong even though he keeps his faith. (1) He decides he's going to hell anyway (or, even more irresponsibly, he thinks he'll get rescued at the last minute), so why bother with being obedient and good? (2) He follows what he thinks are God's commands, and does evil things with a clear conscience and no sense of justice or compassion. Fundamentalism is thus no guarantee against evil behavior, even though most fundamentalists are decent people. Freethought and the secular outlook, concern for this world, offer other and better reasons for being a good person in a good society.
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