Separating Religion and Morality

Back in high school I was somewhat religious. Truth be told I was agnostic but my best friend cleverly used peer pressure to lure me to cell group where we would plan bombings in the name of Allah talk about Jesus. One of the issues that kept cropping up was morality.

See, when you believe in Jesus Christ, you follow God's morality which is lain out in the bible. So believing in God means that you have morals and ethics. But what happens if you don't believe in God? Well they really have no reason to follow any rules or morals at all since they don't believe there will be celestial consequences for their unethical actions.

Sound familiar? I'm not the only one who has been subject to that line of reasoning and I'm sure I won't be the last. I knew right from the start it was a load of Evangelical Bolshevik (pardon my French Russian). I only had to look at my god-fearing christian cousins to know that morality was not dictated by the belief in god. They would lie, cheat and steal all week long but their sinning was all okay, because Jesus died for their sins, all they had to do is go to church and pray for forgiveness.

Clearly, when christians can frivolously sin and when non believers can do good deeds then morality and god are mutually exclusive. Right?

Perhaps, but I for one can't shake off the feeling that their might actually be some people out there who only do the right thing for fear of God sending them to Hell. And this is very dangerous thinking, because as soon as they stop believing, then they start murdering people. Which is interesting because I can't think of any examples of this type of thing ever occuring.

Neverthelesss, Neitsche did follow this line of thinking. He came up with a solution. Instead of living for Jesus, live for yourself. That's not to say don't believe in God/Jesus/Allah etc, just make sure that you believe in yourself as well. Be the hero of your own story; do good things because you are an awesome person. Not for some higher power.