What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

out to be a violent killer. Sheesh.

      Granted, there’s a lot more to interpret from this ancient Levantine tale—for example, it is a cautionary parable about what happens between siblings if their parent favors one over the other (not good). But for our purposes here, we can readily see the explicit significance of the biblical God preferring meat over maize—a divine preference that extends into the New Testament, where, in Romans 14, Saint Paul refers to those who only eat vegetables as “weak.” Thus, Stacy’s colleague’s antipathy toward vegetarianism was on solid biblical footing: both the Old Testament God and God’s number-one New Testament saint don’t like vegetarianism. And so neither did she.

      The point of this anecdote involving Stacy’s eschewal of pepperoni and her coworker’s sacred scorn is not to broach the debate over whether or not we ought to eat animals.² Rather, it is about something bigger, deeper, and more perennial: the regularity and degree to which people think that God’s preferences are relevant in determining what is good or bad, wrong or right, moral or immoral. Or to put it more simply: the widespread notion that how we ethically ought to live is determined by God’s will and wishes.

       What Does the Lord Require?

      While my wife’s former colleague’s belief that God made the planet for us to exploit is certainly extreme, and not typical of most religious people—especially not the moderate and progressive ones—the fact remains that many social and political aspects of our world today are the way they are because lots of people think God wants them to be that way. Consider the scourge of anti-homosexuality. While fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and fundamentalist Jews don’t agree on much, they do agree that homosexuality is immoral, basing their position on what they find in their respective holy scriptures. For example, in the Old Testament, we read passages like Leviticus 20:13, in which God commands that homosexuals be executed. In the New Testament, homosexuals are derogatorily described as “shameful,” “ungodly,” “sinful,” and “immoral” (1 Timothy 1), and elsewhere they are condemned as depraved, wicked, and “deserving of death” (Romans 1). In Islam, homosexuality is also condemned by God—or in Muslim parlance, Allah. According to the Quran (7:80), which blatantly plagiarizes the Old Testament, there was a city of Lut where the men preferred having sex with other men instead of with women, and as a result, Allah destroyed them all and obliterated the city; Allah clearly hates homosexuality so much that he’ll exterminate entire cities as a result. And Allah’s hatred of homosexuals is reiterated in the Hadith—the canonical sayings and doings of the all-perfect Prophet, Muhammad. According to one well-known Hadith (Abu Dawud 4462), the Prophet Muhammad declared that if two men have sex with each other, they shall both be murdered.

      Thus, according to the holy scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the latter two being the two largest religions in the world—God considers homosexuality an abomination deserving of death. And so, according to those who look to this God or Allah for moral guidance, we ought not allow homosexuals to have any rights. They shouldn’t be allowed to get married, raise kids, or love who they want to love. And in more extreme religious contexts, they shouldn’t even be allowed to live. Such has been the situation throughout the reign of Christianity and Islam: homosexuals have been stigmatized, brutalized, and murdered, and they have had their human and civil rights curtailed or denied. And such is still the case in many nations to this day. Why? Because that is what the Lord requires.

      Beyond homosexuality—or meat eating—there exist so many additional patterns of human behavior, cultural norms, and laws in our world today because of people trying to live in a way that they think is required by their God. Consider, for example, beating, hitting, or spanking your kids. Is it OK? Is it moral? Well, according to the biblical God, not only is it OK, it is actually necessary; the Lord decrees that it is a moral imperative to physically harm your child. “If you spare the rod,” we read in Proverbs 13 of the Bible, “you spoil the child.” Proverbs 23 makes it even more explicit: “Do not withhold correction from a child . . . you shall beat him with a rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” And Bible-believers take appropriate heed to such Lordly exhortations; a study from 2010 found that the more strongly Christian an American is, the more likely he or she is to consider spanking to be a good method of disciplining children; a full 85 percent of Christian fundamentalists believe in spanking their kids, compared to only 57 percent of nonreligious Americans.³ Another study, from 2012, compared secular parenting literature with Christian parenting literature; the former was critical of corporal punishment, while the latter was much more positive and supportive of it.⁴ And given that a solid body of research reveals the extent to which corporal punishment is damaging to children—psychologically, emotionally, and physically⁵—this divergence in secular versus religious views over corporal punishment is no mere matter of opinion; the effects are of explicit moral concern.

      The list of things the Lord commands of us is long: what to eat or not eat, who to have sex with and not have sex with, how to dress, how to tend crops, how to trim our facial hair, how many witnesses to procure in order to prove a crime, what day to rest on, what gender ought to be in charge, and so on—and these commands are taken to be imperatively true and ethically binding by billions, thereby significantly shaping the personal morality of countless believers, who then go on to shape so many aspects of our world.

      But here’s the rub: there is no evidence that this God even exists.⁶

       No Proof

      My wife’s former colleague insists that God wants us to eat meat—and yet she has no rigorous evidence that this God even exists. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic fundamentalists who deny homosexuals the right to marry, adopt children, or to simply live—depending on what country we’re talking about—do so by insisting that it is God’s (or Allah’s) will that homosexuals be oppressed. And yet they offer no compelling evidence that this supreme deity is actually real. The parent who hits his children because he believes such abuse is what God wants offers no empirical evidence of this magical being’s verifiable reality.

      And thus we arrive at the first, most basic critique of religiously ensconced theistic morality: it is based on faith in something that has never been positively proven to exist. The manifest failure of God-based morality is that its underlying basis, its central pillar, its muscle, its heart, its engine, its raison d’être—God—has never been shown to actually be real. The traditional theological claim that there is an almighty, all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural being who creates everything, gives commands, and performs miracles, has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Or even a pithy smidgeon of doubt.

      Now, some may object that this traditional theological description of God is rudimentary or unsophisticated; not everyone who believes in God conceives of God as an almighty, all-knowing, fatherlike being. True enough. Most contemporary theologians will point out that there are much more intellectually sophisticated and dynamic theological explications or descriptions of God out there.

      To which I reply: nonsense.

      All such so-called “sophisticated” theology is nothing more than psychedelic poetry propped up by pretentious, pseudointellectual gobbledygook signifying absolutely nothing; it is heady, mind-bending verbiage cloaked in a costume of respectable erudition that doesn’t actually mean a thing—and certainly cannot be substantiated empirically, let alone logically defended. Consider, for example, prominent theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of God as “infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of being.”⁷ Hmm. And that means what, exactly? Nothing at all. According to theologian Hans Küng, God is defined as “the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute in the relative.”⁸ Nice words. Poetic and ethereal—especially if you are high. But they don’t actually mean anything concrete. Deep Christian thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead—along with his process theology progeny—declare that God is “permanent . . . fluent . . . one . . . many . . . actual eminently . . . immanent . . .”⁹ Got that? You sure?