I don't need religion to be moral because I see that religion has little at all do with morality. It is not the source of morality any more than school textbooks are the source of scientific discovery. Rather than a spontaneous creator of morality, as religion claims to be, it can only aspire to be the former's unfortunate cousin: a weak enforcer of doctrine.

This comes from Susan Harris’ essay “God is Not My ‘Mommy,’” which won second place in the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s high school essay contest. She makes an interesting point about the relationship between books and the information in them: books are not truly the sources of information, they are at most the sources where we learn about information. As sources, though, they are certainly fallible.

Religion cannot be a source of morality unless religion is the original producer of morality — but how could such a thesis be defended? It’s hardly plausible. It would make more sense to say that religion is a type of repository for moral beliefs and understandings that have developed over the years — in religion, they are preserved and passed on for future generations. Unfortunately, they also manage to preserve moral beliefs which have become outdated, if not dangerous.

Religion offers a threat, a “fear of God” that for some reason some people really seem to admire. I, however, view real morality as something that is self-driven. It starts with knowledge of what you can and can’t do without hurting other people emotionally or physically, and expands outward. Enforcing a so-called morality through threats of punishment is comparable to enforcing law through the police: it might get the job done, but the ideals are missing in action.

Not all religions employ threats, divine or otherwise, in their attempts to enforce particular moral codes but it’s certainly a common phenomenon. The presence of threats is perhaps not unreasonable, just as the presence of police is not unreasonable, but as Harris makes clear the ultimate need for such a presence is necessarily a long way off from our ideals — and isn’t religion, at least in part, about promoting ideals?

Shouldn’t religion focus on the ideals of adhering to moral codes out of a sense of decency and love rather than out of a fear of hell? Fortunately some do adopt this tactic; many others, though, don’t seem to recognize the problem. I suppose that threats and fear must be attractive to some people because otherwise these religious groups would disappear. This raises the question, then, of why such tactics are so attractive?

Read More:

• Religion 101
• Theism 101
• Does God Exist?