Chapter 24
As I discussed in Chapter 10, most religions try to explain the world, and they set out a moral code. Explaining the world gives the people who follow that religion some sense that they can control their world.
So, for instance, the world may be explained as being full of gods that have special powers over rain, wind, sickness, and so forth. People can get a feeling of control over the world by doing the appropriate religious rites. For instance, someone with a sick child can make an offering to the god in charge of illness, in the hope that the child will be spared. Me, I prefer modern medicine.
Often, a religion’s authority for setting out its moral code is based on the idea that it has explained the world. For this reason, many religions resist scientific explanations of the world, because they feel that this undermines their authority.
They also feel, oddly, that having a scientific explanation of the world instead of a creation myth somehow undermines having a decent moral code of any kind. If religions overcame the idea that they cannot speak about morals unless their creation myth is accepted, and simply spoke directly about morals and values, they would speak with much greater clarity and dignity.
Even more oddly, many religions believe that if you have a moral code, then you are required to believe their creation myth, as if the two have much of anything to do with one another. They believe that you have to accept their version of how the world got started in order to have decent morals. They believe this though it makes no sense.
In fact, many people in the religious Right say that without religion, people will have no morality. Specifically, many claim that people will not behave well toward other people unless they are threatened with hell as a punishment for bad behavior toward others, and promised a reward in heaven for good behavior toward others.
This ignores many things. First, it ignores a depressing level of bad behavior by many religious people throughout history. Although it is sometimes claimed that religion makes people behave better, this assertion is not based on evidence.
Second, it ignores the awful behavior that has sometimes been encouraged by religion such as torturing and killing heretics, and wars based on requiring that a specific religion be accepted by the entire population of a region. Examples of the latter include the Crusades and the Thirty Years’ War.
Third, it ignores the fact that Christian denominations often have loopholes for bad behavior. For instance, Catholics believe that they can sin and still expect to get into heaven, because they can go to confession, confess everything, and then say the prayers required of them. After that, Catholic theology says that they can get into heaven just as though they had never committed those sins. They may have to go through purgatory first, but they’ll get there in the end. Insincere lip service of true repentance has often been tolerated by the Catholic Church. For instance, it was only in 2014 that the Pope excommunicated members of the Mafia, an organized crime ring known for drug running, murder, and extortion.60
Many conservative Protestant denominations expend a lot of effort trying to identify and avoid sin. But many of the actions that they call sins are actions that have no human victims. For instance, adults engaging in consensual sex may have no human victims at all. Likewise, blasphemy definitely has no human victims. Yet these sorts of “sins” are often the ones that are most preached against by conservative Christians. Further, many denominations say that people will go to heaven if they repent of their sins and accept and trust Jesus as their Lord and Savior. None of these ideas leads to the conclusion that good behavior toward other people is necessary for getting into heaven, or for avoiding hell.
In other cases, if a church says that it believes in salvation by grace alone (sola gratia), then this means that a person’s behavior during his or her life does not influence God’s decision on who gets into heaven and who gets sent to hell. At all. That’s what salvation by grace alone means, and it’s a central tenet in many conservative Christian denominations.
On the other hand, many liberal Christian denominations reject the idea that hell is a real place. Others believe that heaven, if it exists, is where everybody gets to go after death. Again, these ideas do not lead to the conclusion that good behavior toward others is necessary for getting into heaven, or for avoiding hell.
So, Christians may say good things about other people and do good things for other people. They may say that they are doing it in the name of their faith. But no matter what type of Christians they are, their faith’s dogma may not insist that they have to behave well toward other people in order to get into heaven.
On the other hand, “crimes” against dogma may be punishable by hell, even though they have no human victims. Crimes against dogma are things like heresy, apostasy, or blasphemy. This means that good behavior toward other people is less important than what you say or do regarding god. So it is often the case that a faith’s theology specifically does not decree that good moral behavior towards other people has much to do at all with a person’s going to heaven.
What’s Hell Got to Do with It?
Finally, it also ignores the fact that many of the upright people who settled this country did not believe that heaven would be their reward for a virtuous life, nor hell their punishment for a bad one.
In fact, they believed that heaven and hell had nothing to do with a person’s behavior. Nothing.
What’s John Calvin (and the Puritans, and the Presbyterians) Got to Do with It?
You heard me right.
A significant portion of the United States was settled by Puritans and Presbyterians, both of which are Calvinist religions. This means that they believed that heaven was not a reward for good behavior on earth, nor hell a punishment for bad behavior. Why? Because in Calvinist religions, whether you go to heaven or to hell is decided long before you are born, and nothing you do during your life can change it.
That’s a Calvinist doctrine.
So, many of the people who settled this country did not believe that they would be rewarded for good behavior in heaven, nor punished for bad behavior in hell.
In the case of Puritans, they believed that only members of the “elect” would go to heaven, and this was decided before a person was born. However, they thought that in life there were signs of proof that someone had been elected. These signs were things like doing good works, having a successful business, having a healthy family, and being an upstanding citizen. So Puritans often tried to behave well, but not in order to get into heaven.
In the case of Presbyterians, they too believe that only the elect get into heaven and that this is decided before you are born, and that nothing you do on earth can cause you to deserve to get into heaven. However, they recommend that you be good and generous to other people for different reasons—to express gratitude for salvation, to follow advice in the Bible about feeding the hungry and clothing the needy, or to behave toward the unfortunate as Christ did.
None of this involves earning points toward getting a good afterlife!
Yet the Puritans and Presbyterians kept to their rather strict moral codes about as well as anybody sticks to their moral code. They built thriving cities, towns, and farms. They put a great deal of effort into making good cities, good institutions, and good societies. They thought that good laws that stopped people from taking unfair economic advantage of others were important, as were providing good schools and taking care of the destitute.
But they did not do this in order to give themselves a good afterlife. They did this all without the benefit of thinking that they were working toward a reward in heaven, or trying to avoid punishment in hell.
We Are Told that Those Were the Good Old Days
The times when they did this are considered by many conservative groups to be the “good old days” in America. Yet, when people were good, they were often good without any consideration at all of how this would affect their chances of getting into heaven.
So it has been proven by American history itself that society can do very well without using threats of heaven and hell to keep us in line.
The Wedge Document is Anti-Christian and Anti-American
What’s more, Calvinist Christians believed, and still believe, that humans cannot be perfected, but they can and should be encouraged to behave better by setting up good secular institutions. They believe that better behavior here on earth is possible, and desirable in its own right. Good secular institutions include things like public schools, public libraries, and other public, government-run establishments.
The folks who push ID run directly counter to this Christian doctrine. Here’s a quote from the Wedge document:
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.61
So the folks at the Discovery Institute directly oppose good public institutions that help people to behave better and lead better lives, because they say that this is “utopian.” Never mind that many of the Calvinist Christian reformers who set up many of these institutions were the exact opposite of utopians, and never believed that human society could be perfect. They merely believed that it could be better, and that a better society, created through better public institutions, was worth working for.
Evidently, the Discovery Institute wants to take apart all the fine institutions and public works that good people throughout American history have worked so hard to make happen, because making people’s lives better is “utopian.” This means that the Discovery Institute is anti-American. Now let’s move on to scurvy, another example of how we are badly designed.