GOD IN MORAL TERMS IS QUITE USELESS

Christianity holds that you need God to ground morality.  In other words, God is just and generous and good and loving and firmly so and as we are in his image we should be like that too.  We are obligated to be.

[First off, nobody wants to believe that they only did their duty when they gave a beggar some food.  There is something inhuman and damaging about that in the minds of many.  If you stop seeing human love as spontaneously good and see it as a duty relationships go all wrong.  Clearly this doctrine of God being equated in some meaningful way with morality is not the noble thing it is claimed to be.]

So God is a guard against people just thinking what they want to think about moral principles and how to decide what ones apply and why to apply them.  It is linked to the notion that if God matters like Jesus said then that surely implies that you cannot be truly moral or moral for long without respecting God and confessing his existence.

[Seeing what we just learned about how having to be generous like God actually turns generosity into something other than generosity, an obligation, we now see something else.  God is now used to make thought crimes!  This is about control.]

God is the reason why killing an unborn baby for fun is wrong even if everybody disagrees and celebrates it. This is not about God for the real motive is to stop chaos not affirm God.  God is not God here but a prop.

It does not follow that if God is moral that it should affect me.  What if we are all damaged and cannot see morality clearly?  Jesus incredibly did say we can see clearly if we cast the beam out of the eye before we look at another to judge them.  He said God judges those who find motes in the eyes of the other and miss the plank in their own the implication being that he embraces those who judge themselves as they do their neighbour.  This validates the morality of the time.  What if God is too different from us - and he would be - so that we cannot learn from him adequately?

The claim that God is morally perfect seems circular. It seems to be saying, “God is perfect for God is perfect as a God”. Or, “God is perfect for God is perfect at being God.”

If he were perfectly life-affirming and life-preserving that simply describes a fact. He does nothing that undermines or harms life. But if you say God morally should be these things you end up with a circle.  A God who upholds life may not be doing it because he is fair.  He might only be just doing it.  God upholding life raises the question, "Is it fair?" A circle is a cheat and a lie.  Begging the question to affirm a moral God then is violating the morals you want to support. If God needs that then he cannot really help or validate moral principles at all.

So again a moral God does not help us.  It hinders.

Let us look at morality more to see what else we can learn.

Morality is studied in three parts.

Part one is descriptive morality - and it is about what people believe to be moral. It describes moral behaviour or behaviour that aims to be moral.

Part two is normative or prescriptive morals - asks if people have the right morals. It warns that good intentions are not enough.

Part three is meta-ethics which seeks to use God and other ideas to explain what ought or moral right actually mean. The reverse is explaining what ought-not and moral wrong or sin mean. It is philosophical and is about the brain work and the definitions.

It is absolutely certain that meta-ethics only gets a disservice from the God theory.

God being a being of spirit would be very unlike us and his values would not be values in any feeling or emotional sense. 

Philosopher Kant said that morality is about imperatives not your feelings.  Kant like this version of God then was guilty of making morality all about unfeeling rules. The rule matters and how you feel for others does not. It is about treating others well but without warmth. This cannot work.  We are feeling creatures and we need a role model God who can blend both. God cannot give us that.

And if Kant bans you aborting the unborn on the basis that it is not a person yet for nobody would exist if all were aborted, what if there were a parallel universe where abortion was life-giving? I know that makes no sense. But that is not the point. The point is that his morality is not about being good and fair but about guesses.

Christians say that God looks at your heart not just your rules. So moral rules are not cold iron restrictions but things you want to keep and joyfully obey. But God is not a like a person and to say we must be moral for God is just and fair and loving is just another way of following cold rules. We warm up the rules not God. So if our hearts are sweet and ethical that is only partly to do with faith in God. To love God alone as the source of all moral good is to lie to yourself.

If somebody totally evil had a bad heart and now started acting morally hoping to do good despite what was inside and in the hope that the heart would change with these moral exercises, Christianity is telling that person they are still evil and bad.  This is not a religion that knows what morality is.  It is in fact showing that its claim to love the sinner, hate the sin is false.  It hates the sinner and won't admit it.  If sin gives you cause to love another then it follows that the Church should run to the worst sinners for they need the most love.  It never does that.  Love the sinner and hate the sin is an excellent cover if you are passive-aggressive.

The claim that if we have free will and God should strip us of it in order to stop us going too far, perhaps destroying each other, is said to be advocating a grave evil. So it is more evil to take it from us even for a while to stop us than to let us kill each other!  This shows the absurdity of calling God useful morally.  Christianity cannot get the argument, "God has given us free will as a gift" beyond the status of a mere opinion.  Opinion is no basis for trust or faith or religion.  It goes too far.

Religion when it says morality comes from God is saying that God is loving and kind and merciful and fair but these are not good in themselves. They are only good because God has them. So if you are merciful you must be merciful for no reason other than that God is. You want to mirror him and glorify him. You want to show him and not yourself. You want to be the image of the goodness of God. This is nonsense for it denies that any pleasure or good consequences or intrinsic moral value is enough. It must be all about God. You just have to love for God loves. Or be merciful. And so on.

As God is to be regarded as the sole and loving source of all, he matters totally. So mirroring him matters.  Now if something is inherently evil, intrinsically evil, such as hitting a baby, then surely it is vile regardless of whether there is a God or not.  To say all that matters is mirroring God is saying that the inherent evil does not matter much in comparison.  That is downright inhuman. To say it does not matter at all any way is downright evil.  Religion will say that inherent evil cannot be true unless there is an inherently good god. That takes us back to the vicious circle we viewed earlier. 

The argument that if you deny there is a moral God then you cannot call anything evil suffers from:

We tend to call something evil some time after it happens.  We judge after the event when it is too late. 

We do the judging despite saying only God can see if one really intended to do evil and to what extent they would be evil.  This is about our opinion not God.  Pride lurks there.

We should see that evil and good are really grey.  The good done to x does harm to y.  Philosophers have said that free will or freedom is about being the master or the slave in any particular situation. The master in x is a slave in y.  The person with enough money to do what they want is a slave to the money.  The believer is a slave to the God they think exists.  It is bad to be a slave for a real God but worse to be one for an imaginary one.

As pride is regarded as the ultimate evil and the root of all sin and violence, humility then must be the ultimate virtue.  But is not love the ultimate virtue?  The Church will argue that as God said you must love the other but does not command that you love yourself for you do that anyway and the problem is you love yourself too much at any given time.  Humility is seen as seeing that you must concentrate on the wellbeing of others and look after yourself for them not for you.  So there is no real contradiction.  It falls back on the idea that you give love to God and he gives you the power to rise above self-interest and others benefit.  This accuses atheists of being evil and prideful.  They miss the God mark even if they make idols of the neighbour.  The Church will say they fail to see their love as a gift from a loving God so the love for neighbour as good as it is, is defective and will collapse.

Nobody commands that atheists should be punished and hated even above murderers so this is an example of how believers in God do not really know what they are talking about.  Faith is to blame if this changes and atheists end up slaughtered.  It has already happened to pagans who believe in spirits and gods rather than God.

The fact is that even if God grounds morality, that does not matter to us at all.  You cannot know enough about a God to say you have a reasonable relationship with him.  The friend you only meet for a minute a week is not a friend except in your head.  Our ideas about God are not God.  To treat our idea of God as God is idolatry, the evil of treating what is not God as God.  In other words, an idolater adoring a statue is saying it is up to him or her who to worship. This is about what they want not what a God might deserve.  It is selfish.  But the fact is that believers in God have fallen down the same trap.

We should simply look at something harmful and just see that it is something that any goodness or any good being would not tolerate.  Belief in God makes this more complicated.  It says we need God to justify calling it evil.  It is like looking at cream bun and not believing it properly until somebody tells you, "The bun is really there for God does not lie."  If you believe just believe and you don't need props.

Persuading somebody not to harm another is compatible with respecting that person’s right to choose. You are asking them to uphold the dignity of their freedom and use it correctly. God is responsible for the evil we do for he does not do anything to persuade us to rethink. Gentle persuasion is not persuasion but a weak effort.

Suppose you are accused of doing evil. Anyone calling this evil will note that those who oppose your evil will probably use evil means to try and stop it.  For example, if you are killing women on the street some will resolve to murder you.  Why do people fight fire with fire?  It is basically about making you see that you need to remove and correct the evil in yourself. You see the ugliness of the evil that hunts you down and should turn you off your own evil and make you see that evil leads to one evil person harming another evil person for they don't like the evil in them.  It is known that you cannot deter people from evil except by exposing the ugliness and futility of the evil. We will say then that love the sinner and hate the sin is rubbish for once anybody calls what you do evil they are calling on evil to be done against you to stop you.  We are not against evil at all.  We only cherry-pick what evil we like and what evil we do not like.

Kant and Feuerbach talked about religion and faith in God as fetishism. This is a mental trick where you think you have put the powers in you outside of you and they reside in a God. It is bad for it leads to you failing to see the virtue in yourself and by extension others. You end up alienated from your good side and from your true self. This is true. I think I have detailed the ways this happens.  All incoherence regarding evil and God shows the religious mindset is indeed a fetish.

The futility of the person depending on God and the futility of the idea of God have been shown. Do not be lied to.

No Copyright