Religion is the Greatest Enemy of Morality
Atheists are often called to task by religious apologists for having no basis for their morals. A smaller contingent among the religious community would even go as far as contending that atheists cannot be moral in a principled sense. However, I am going to argue here that it is religious people who cannot really be moral in any substantively principled sense.
First, I want you to take a look at the picture below:
The quote by the pastor sums up the entire apologetics enterprise in a few words. This individual is obviously operating in what one may call “bad faith”, but kudos where it is due: at least, he is self-aware and transparent about what is actually going on. The reality is that most religious people simply do not have this level of self-awareness and even if they did, they probably would not make the same admission publicly.
It also reminds me of something another self-aware Christian wrote. Here are the words of Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writing in the 19th Century, in a letter to an acquaintance:
“If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth was outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky (Complete Letters, 1868 – 1871).
A while ago, in the middle of a conversation with a Christian colleague who was affirming the “goodness” of God, I asked him if there was anything he could think of that God could do that would make him change his view of God – basically, anything that would make him switch from viewing God as “all-good” to, perhaps, “not-so-good” (or even “bad”). This colleague of mine told me emphatically that there was nothing that God could do that would make them change their view of God’s character.
Ordinarily, that would be a counterintuitive thing to say about any person. Being an ethically principled person inevitably entails that there are certain actions and behaviours that one would find objectionable, regardless of who is doing them. But the thing is, I believe my colleague. I find that the truly religious person cannot be ethically principled in the manner that I was sort of expecting my Christian colleague to be. If one takes a minute – even as a sceptic – to think about my colleague’s response to the question I asked him, one would have to accept that his response should not be surprising at all because, assuming we take the Christian scriptures as historical accounts, there aren’t many potentially atrocious acts that the God of the Bible could do that he hasn’t already done.
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Think about it; if the biblical accounts are historically accurate, we would be talking about an omniscient God who knew from the very beginning that the world he was creating was going to be a “fallen world” saturated with so much evil, misery and gratuitous suffering, yet he went ahead to bring this world into being (1 John 3:20, Job 37:16, Genesis 1&2). We would be talking about a God who banished and placed curses on the first human couple Adam and Eve (a curse which, by the way, has been inherited by their descendants i.e. the entire human population) for doing something he deemed evil, even though, according to the same biblical account, Adam and Eve couldn’t possibly have had any knowledge of good and evil prior to eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which God conveniently placed in their midst (Genesis 3).
Still on that thread, if the biblical accounts are historically accurate, we would be talking about a God who at one point decided to drown the entire world in a flood, including babies, in an attempt to rid the world of wickedness and somehow start afresh despite knowing that it ultimately wasn’t going to work because wickedness would just re-enter the world (Genesis 6). We would be talking about a God who reportedly slaughtered the firstborn sons of an entire nation because their king (the Pharoah) refused to let his “chosen people” (the Israelites) go – and to make matters worse, in a rather bizarre twist, the same God would admit to hardening the heart of the Pharoah just so he could display his destructive power and satisfy his sadistic bloodthirst (Exodus 11).
Continuing in the same vein, we would be talking about a God that commanded the genocide of entire nations, including (once again) little children for the supposed sins of their parents (1st Samuel 15:3). We would be referring to a God who endorsed slave trade (Leviticus 25:44–46). We would be talking about a God that made a wager with satan, essentially giving him the green light to cause the destruction of the entire family of a faithful worshipper of His named Job, just so he (God) could prove a point to satan (Job 1) – the same satan whom he created, by the way. I could go on but I believe that any intelligent and honest reader would have gotten the point by now. Christians and Jews all over the world still view this same God as somehow being synonymous with goodness despite all of the aforementioned acts which the vast majority of believers take to be historical. In fact, they refer to this God as the paradigm of goodness and expect us sceptics to pledge our unbridled allegiance to such a character.
In an episode of the Within Reason Podcast hosted by atheist YouTuber Alex O’Connor, renowned Christian apologist Dr William Lane Craig while offering a defence of the slaughter of the Canaanites by the Israelites admitted that if any group of people did the exact same thing that the Israelites did, it would be morally reprehensible, but because the massacre was commanded by God, it was a morally justified act. What Dr Craig didn’t know, or perhaps knew but couldn’t give a hoot about, was that by making such a statement, he was essentially biting one of the bullets in the Euthyphro dilemma. In other words, he is inadvertently saying that an action can be considered good simply because it was commanded by God – a proposition that renders the concept of moral goodness arbitrary and dependent on the whims of God. The consequence of this is that if God could command any action, even something harmful or unjust (like rape, for example), then that action would become morally “good” just by divine decree. This, of course, flies in the face of consistency and objectivity in terms of moral standards.
The moral of the story here is that whenever you set out to have a discussion with a religious person, especially on a subject that touches on the character of their God, there is a very high probability that you are basically going to be arguing with a ‘semi-conscious automaton’ whose mind had already been made up before the conversation even began. Religious people typically do not look at the behaviour of their God as depicted in their respective scriptures and deduce from what they read that their God is all-good; rather they start with the premise that their God is all-good and then deduce from that manufactured axiom that everything He does must be good. In other words, God can do no wrong in the eyes of the religionist, and if there are any passages that depict God doing something that may reasonably be deemed to be evil, then the devoutly religious person sees it as his duty to perform some sort of mental gymnastic in order to justify such behaviour, therefore dealing with the cognitive dissonance.
I will say this in conclusion; the more I look back on some of the views that I either held or rationalized when I was a staunch believer and divine command theorist, and the more I continue to have conversations with religious people across the board today (like my Christian colleague), especially on the ethics of segments of their favourite “holy scriptures”, the more I have come to realize that religious people are, in actuality, some of the most morally deficient people one could ever find. Indeed, I have come to realize, after all these years, why 19th-century British philosopher and ethical theorist John Stuart Mill referred to religion as “the greatest enemy of morality”, hence the title of this essay.
Think about it; the very notion of allowing one’s moral intuitions and judgements to be guided strictly by some archaic scribbles that were evidently jotted down by and for a specific people in a specific period (under the vacuous pretext that these texts were revealed by a supreme deity and are thus infallible), as opposed to actually evaluating issues in view of their potential to minimize suffering and maximize both individual and collective well-being, is, in my opinion, a classic example of simultaneously committing ethical and intellectual suicide. Blindly outsourcing one’s responsibility in working out, however complex, what is ethically beneficial versus what is ethically detrimental in any given situation is an abdication of moral responsibility and an affront to our intelligence and moral reasoning.
Additionally (and this is the really sinister thing), it allows certain people to mask their cruelty under a cloak of virtue. Very few things are more effective at allowing people to do reprehensible things with a clear conscience than religious indoctrination. That is something I regard as deeply concerning.
