Thursday, March 11, 2010

Fear = Morality?

In a previous post, I referred to Christian morality as being "artificial". And while this post sort of touches on the same subject, I'm hoping to add to it. I view 'Christian morality' as not only being fake, but the motivating forces as not even being about morality. As I have said previously, "if 'Christian  morality' is morality, then artificial-sweetener is sugar". But without getting into that too much, what is the driving force behind this false-morality?

The driving force behind 'Christian morality' is also the ultimate form of deluded self-preservation. All of us (or at-least most) have an instinctual sense of self-preservation. To avoid injury and death, many animals will go to extreme lengths. What makes humans even more susceptible to a deluded sense of self-preservation is the knowledge that death is inevitable. The fear of death is typically hardwired into a species, and this would obviously be very beneficial to its survival. Primitive humans would naturally use their capacity of fantasy to counter-balance the knowledge of death, "my body might die, but my mind (soul) won't", this mental separation between mind and body allows humans to better cope with the loss of a loved one, along with help cope with the understanding they will die as well (but they think only their body will die, not the mind). Without doing this, the hardwired fear of death would be too overwhelming for humans to cope. Am I saying that atheists are more "evolved" then a 'believer'? Sort of, but that would be another discussion all together.

These two examples (A and B) reflect a point, that being, one is a child that is acting well-behaved vs. a child that is well-behaved. Can you tell the difference? This question may be hard if not impossible if you are a Christian.  

A). Billy wishes he could kick the dog, not study, skip school, smoke cigarettes, and steal other children's lunch money. He however doesn't do these things because of the fear that his father will beat him if he does.

B). Johnny wishes to do well in school, study hard, and have loving relationships with other people and with his dog. Even if Johnny was a horrible kid, his parents would still love him, and would never use the fear of pain to get him to behave. Being well-behaved comes to Johnny naturally, he is kind to others, and highly motivated to succeed.

I know these examples are very simplistic, but the issue of morality in the discussed context is just as much so. One would also think that this would be this obvious to a Christian that claims morality originates in such a way. But to make everything worse, Billy thinks he is better behaved then Johnny, even though we all know what Billy would do if he wasn't afraid of his father. Billy isn't really a good kid, he's just a fearful one. While Christians are unable to make the distinction, there is a big difference between acting "good" out of fear, and acting good because of a general desire to do so. And the same goes in the case of 'Christian morality', there is a big difference between deluded self-preservation and innate-morality. As Micheal Pain said "In the absence of fear there is little faith". It is obvious that Christians are not moral, they are just afraid.

1 comment:

  1. "A morality is a system of principles and values concerning people's behavior, which is generally accepted by a society " in regard is to behavior is not directly related to one's desires. In your blog your suggesting if you have a reason to behave morally, it is not moral...also you are suggesting that Christians only are moral out of fear, which I disagree to some extent. I do not believe they think "wow, i better help that old lady cross the street or god will surly send me to hell."

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