Would you still be a moral person if ____________?

[Bravus]

Check out my good mate Mr Kohlberg for a great scale of moral development. (Google)

[Tom Wetmore]

Also, a similar perspective - Fowler's Stages of Faith Development...

If we correlate the development of faith with moral development, it seems many are stuck at early immature stages.

I think that most would understand that an essential element of faith would be to foster moral development. I think it also reasonable to expect that as one increases moral maturity there would be positive behavioral evidence of that higher moral development. (If not, what is the point exactly?) In any other area of life we learn, practice, improve and continue to progress by doing so until we reach an optimal level. If not, we abandon the activity, seek a different approach that does work, or settle into mediocrity.

And as has already been noted, Christians seem little different from non-Christians when it comes to moral performance. That seems a pretty strong indication of immature moral development. Something isn't working very well. Maybe it is because a reward/punishment approach to teaching moral values isn't all that effective especially when neither the reward or punishment is directly connected to the behavior either in time or substance.

[CoAspen]

I started questioning that whole idea, as mentioned in your last sentance, and have rejected it as a misunderstanding of God that we have missed in study the life of Christ.

[cardw]

I think it goes beyond a misunderstanding of Jesus. I think Jesus was hi-jacked.

Jesus says some things that are rather disturbing, like you must hate your mother and father to follow me. There are several of these that give us a clue that Jesus may have been teaching concepts of moral and conscious development that are more like Buddhism. The parallel saying of Buddha is if you see Buddha on the road you must kill him.

Another parallel is when Buddha says life is suffering. Jesus is a man of suffering. The point being is that in a reward/punishment world view suffering will always be seen as bad. This is not the case when one explores life in what is called the deeper truths.

Because we have this reward/punishment world view it is very difficult to understand what Buddha was saying and similarly what Jesus was saying. These sayings are only understood within the context of encountering the suffering of life.

The following video is a presentation at Google by Buddhist nun Rubina Courtin. She talks about Buddhism as not being a religion, but a hypothesis to be explored and verified. Happiness and morality are a side effect of this verification.

Of particular interest is her work with people in prison. To me this is closer to what Jesus was teaching than what Christianity presents to the world today.

[abelisle]

Re: Tom's statement about Christian's moral performance as little different from non-Christians that seems to be a pretty strong indication of immature moral development.

I think this is true because most Christians have not had a "metanoic experience" as described in Romans 12:2 of being different from the world through being transformed by the renewing of their minds .

Therefore the majority Christian experience is vacuous and based on societal and cultural conditioning not true conversion.

Alex

[cardw]

This is another Buddhist parallel because Buddhism teaches the renewing of one's mind as essential to happiness.

Here is a short video that covers an interesting myth and some parallel teachings of Jesus and Buddha.

[Ellen]

I think I would be moral by trial and error. You feel good when you do good and you feel bad when you treat someone badly or hurt another in all the various ways.

As we know God's strict laws are really our manual for how we really run right. They aren't arbitrary or meaningless.

[cardw]

If a person can't figure out that it's wrong to kill someone or steal then they're an idiot.

There are many sources for how to behave in one's culture besides the Bible.

Every culture has codes of behavior. Even animals have codes of behavior.

This idea that we need the Bible to tell us how to behave has no basis.

[Gerr]

So then, if there is no God, and if man and beast have a common ancestry, how could man arrive at the idea that it is wrong to kill another human while it's all right for a lion to kill an antelope or even another lion?

[cardw]

If we look at why a lion kills, it's for food and self preservation.

The Bible instructs people to kill others based on belief and ethnicity. It even instructs people to be killed in tortuous ways such as burning or stoning. And even worse the Bible has God instructing people killed for gathering wood on a particular day.

I would say the lion had a superior ethical code.

[Jonnothin]

There is another problem with the question (I don't know if this was mentioned or not because there are a lot of posts), but if there is not God as stated at the beginning and we came into being say by accident (which seems to be the only other option) then how do we have anything good? I mean all good things come from God right? I guess I'm saying that we'd have to assume that good can come from nothing the same as bad can so maybe this is completely irrelevant.

Please tell me if this doesn't make sense.

[Bravus]

By saying 'all good things come from God' you assume the thing you conclude.

[cardw]

I have said this before that Jesus doesn't even appeal to the Bible for ethics.

He appeals to empathy in one of his most famous statements to do unto others as we would have done to us. He clearly is not using laws to make his point.

Higher orders of ethics are internal, not external. Laws and sacred books are external. Empathy is internal.

That is the problem with the general tone of Christianity today. It is mainly about externals.

[JawgeFromJawja]

There are multiple approaches to answering your question.

One of those is that we as a culture mutually agree to uphold certain rights considered inalienable, including "life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", along with respect for other rights incidental to those three. This is a mutual agreement that helps avoid chaos. Of course, not all people mutually respect such a "social contract". Eventually, their disrespectful behavior tends to come back and haunt them by various dynamics of the culture.

JawgeFromJawja

[cricket]

I'll answer it: my behavior wouldn't change very much--I'd quit praying and quit reading my Bible, and I'd quit posting on religious topics.

My personality would be the same, and my relationships would be the same.

[Guest]

The only thing that would probably change for me is that I would lose hope. If there was no God, there would be nothing for me to look forward to..just live my life and die. And like Cricket said..there would be no point in praying or even being in a wonderful forum like this.

[CoAspen]

How do you know that is the way you would feel? You are expressing feelings as if God were to disappear now. If you were to never know of such a being is the question. You can't lose something you do not know about. Now granted Alex did remove God after the possibility of His existence. If the existence of God is the only reason for moral behavior, then we are lost anyway.

There is no way of knowing what the universe would be like if there was no God. Why would we suppose it to be evil? According to the Bible, evil arose with Satan, not preexisting along with Good.

[cricket]

But the original question did state the premise that if we found out today, without a doubt that there was no God, then how would we change. So, in a way, it is losing a belief in something(one) that was never really there, but the loss of belief is what "disappears now".

[CoAspen]

Yes, but I think the question is bigger than we realize! What would change in our lives? For me, that gets down to the issue of how/why we 'operate' in our daily lives.

[cardw]

I think it is better question when we ask, "What if we never were taught that there was a god?"

We can actually study what this would be like. There is a tribe in Brazil called the Piraha that has resisted conversion to Christianity for centuries. They are natural atheists. They don't see anything as created. They live completely in the present. Missionaries soon realize that the Piraha see the story of heaven, god, and the gospel as superstition.

MIT did a study on the happiness of different cultures. The Piraha were rated the happiest culture in the world based on the great majority of the time they spend laughing and smiling during the day.

Why would they need anything to provide hope when they already have it?

Suicide is so unthinkable to them that when they heard of it they laughed. They could not understand why anyone would want to kill themselves.

The gospel has absolutely no appeal to them because they are already happy.

[cricket]

I understand that--however, for me, personally, not much would change. I don't choose action X instead of Y because the Bible instructs it so, but rather because I know intrinsically (and sometimes through experience) that X has much better outcomes than action Y.

Granted, I have made some rather HUGE mistakes in life, but they were opportunities to learn from and to change my behavior in the future.

[CoAspen]

Works for me!

[D.A. Wintsmith]

abelisle, I probably won't answer your question as intended because I'm stuck on the first sentence, imagining HOW I would have discovered there was no God. Would science have gotten us to the point that I could break free of this one planet and dimension, so that I could have searched all possibilities and thus found the nonexistence of God? Or maybe a change in consciousness world-wide pushed us out of our heads so that we could see and grasp the hugeness of things and discovered within it, the nonexistence of God? The vehicle that takes us to this discovery would, in itself, change our society, and not just me.

If that is the case, society would be shivered down to its timbers since most belief systems, and a few non-belief systems, hold God to be integral to it. Even Satanism demands God to exist so it has something to write backwards and turn upsidedown. Even atheism wouldn't be left untouched. It could no longer test itself against the boundaries of the possibility of God.

You're going to have a lot of upset people.

So yeah, my relationships are definitely going to change because in your scenario there's a huge worldwide crisis happening that is on the level of what would happen if the extraterrestrials landed. Our whole world view is going sideways--only instead of having to deal with the awareness that We Are Not Alone, we are grappling with We Are Truly Alone.

People are not only upset in your scenario, they are panicked. There is chaos in the streets, and the stock market makes a huge plunge. You think 9/11 had a far-lasting empact on the economy, just wait till the news that God Absolutely Is NOT gets around.

At some point, after the world has turned on its side and nothing resembles its former self, people will have to rebuild. They will have to re-examine everything they thought God told them, and decide if any of it works anymore. Now we're getting to the other end of your first question -- what would I do.

I've actually been through this before. My theological and philosophical world turned on its side, and I had to sift through and rebuild a moral system that worked for me. It may not surprise you to discover that my new moral system resembles the one I was taught as a child in a great many ways, but not in all ways. Step by step and with great caution and much silent observation, I rebuilt. I had to decide what my ethics were, and why. I had to test my ethics against the world around me as well as against what I, myself resonated with; and think and observe some more. At least in your scenario I wouldn't have to figure out if I needed to belong to a particular religion, or try to work out if my prayers were going to the right place.

And yet, I suspect that once the world had re-aligned itself, I would be back with the question that has kept me flexible in my thinking thus far: What if I am mistaken?

[Robert]

If there were no God then you wouldn't be here to ask the question.  Hence your question about behavior is meaningless.

If there were no God then the evolutionist would have it right, but evolution is an impossibility.  

Where there is a watch there is a watchmaker.

[Robert]

What motivates me to do good?

To attempt to answer your question I must overlook the fact that nothing can exist outside Divinity, but for you I'll do that.

My motive, based on what I know of human nature, would be to outwardly act as if I were the kindest, gentlest person in the world so that I could maximize my chance of getting ahead in life.

If you protest my answer I need to remind you that without God it is impossible to do genuine good. The best I can do without God is to do outwardly good things for a selfish motive. In other words I would be the politician of all politicians.