God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes. If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from murdering each other left and right?
Suppose Omega makes a credible threat that if you ever step inside a bathroom between 7AM and 10AM in the morning, he'll kill you. Would you be panicked by the prospect of Omega withdrawing his threat? Would you cower in existential terror and cry: "If Omega withdraws his threat, then what's to keep me from going to the bathroom?" No; you'd probably be quite relieved at your increased opportunity to, ahem, relieve yourself.
Which is to say: The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not. If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.
If Overcoming Bias has any religious readers left, I say to you: it may be that you will someday lose your faith: and on that day, you will not lose all sense of moral direction. For if you fear the prospect of God not punishing some deed, that is a moral compass. You can plug that compass directly into your decision system and steer by it. You can simply not do whatever you are afraid God may not punish you for doing. The fear of losing a moral compass is itself a moral compass. Indeed, I suspect you are steering by that compass, and that you always have been. As Piers Anthony once said, "Only those with souls worry over whether or not they have them." s/soul/morality/ and the point carries.
You don't hear religious fundamentalists using the argument: "If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from eating pork?" Yet by their assumptions - that we have no moral compass but divine reward and retribution - this argument should sound just as forceful as the other.
Even the notion that God threatens you with eternal hellfire, rather than cookies, piggybacks on a pre-existing negative value for hellfire. Consider the following, and ask which of these two philosophers is really the altruist, and which is really selfish?
"You should be selfish, because when people set out to improve society, they meddle in their neighbors' affairs and pass laws and seize control and make everyone unhappy. Take whichever job that pays the most money: the reason the job pays more is that the efficient market thinks it produces more value than its alternatives. Take a job that pays less, and you're second-guessing what the market thinks will benefit society most."
"You should be altruistic, because the world is an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and the strategy that fares best is Tit for Tat with initial cooperation. People don't like jerks. Nice guys really do finish first. Studies show that people who contribute to society and have a sense of meaning in their lives, are happier than people who don't; being selfish will only make you unhappy in the long run."
Blank out the recommendations of these two philosophers, and you can see that the first philosopher is using strictly prosocial criteria to justify his recommendations; to him, what validates an argument for selfishness is showing that selfishness benefits everyone. The second philosopher appeals to strictly individual and hedonic criteria; to him, what validates an argument for altruism is showing that altruism benefits him as an individual: higher social status or more intense feelings of pleasure.
So which of these two is the actual altruist? Whichever one actually holds open doors for little old ladies.
If someone built a complicated morality system around the morality of God and suddenly changed it, they should be afraid. This fear doesn't necessarily stem from an, "Oh crap, I will now murder!" vibe. The idea that everything one believed about morality was wrong (or, at the very least, right for the wrong reasons) should shock them to the core. If it doesn't... then I find this statement severely misleading:
It takes time to put everything back into place. If a moral system was built with a non-God-source but the person thought it was a God-source, sure, then your post makes sense. But what if that isn't actually what is happening? What if the question of wanton murder is actually just a different phrasing of the question "If not God, what is the source of morality?"
The answer to this question begins nonsensically. The issue of a religious God-sourced morality isn't that there is a real morality system behind the curtain acting as if it were God-sourced. The issue is that this external non-God-source system isn't being identified as a morality system at all and, in the extreme cases you have labeled religious fundamentalists, this external system cohabits the same control structure. "Thou shalt not murder" is not equivalent to the statement "I do not want to murder." But both thou-shalt-not-murder and I-do-not-want-to-murder result in the behavioral pattern of not-murder.
A good example of the split between these systems is the simple answer, "Because it is illegal and I will be incarcerated." Made even simpler, it is the equivalence of a knee-jerk reaction to touching a hot stove. In practice, this has little to do with morality (unless you want it to.) The idea that a hot stove hurts is a fundamental cause but I don't personally consider it a relevant indicator of a moral compass. This will certainly bleed into a morality system at some point and it makes sense that murder is closer to that bleed than eating pork. But it is my opinion that there is a distinct difference between a religious claim of a God-source morality and their pragmatic reaction to reality.
This could be a great segue into a handful of interesting topics about the definitions of morality and behavioral patterns and where the lines cross and so on. Instead, I am choosing to focus on using the claims of "murder is wrong" and "I do not want to murder" to distinguish between a moral reason to not murder and a pragmatic reason to not murder.
Stripping out the morality system doesn't (necessarily) change the other system -- nor does it necessarily change one's behavior. The idea that a behavior survives the first system (the God-source-morality system) does not imply that the second system performs the exact same role. In other words, a second system re-enforcing behavior patterns in the first system does not imply that the first system isn't really there.
Likewise, being scared of opening up, working on, and potentially dismantling or replacing the God-source-morality system is justifiable. A rebuilding of the morality system with a new source will (or should) have drastic behavioral effects. But these effects can be supplemented and carried by what I am calling the second system until the new morality system gets up and running. Disbelieving in God is not going to turn someone into a murderer because there are still plenty of good reasons to not be a murderer.
Eventually tying this back into a morality system isn't likely to be as difficult as it appears to the religious fundamentalist. In my opinion, I think it is likely that the replacement system is built independently of the God-source system and when the non-God-source morality system provides a plausible alternative, one can actually begin considering a switchover. In the meantime, there are a lot of uneasy sounding questions like, "But what about murder?" Fortunately, there are answers to those questions.
But the actual point of my comment is directed at this statement:
Negative values are not necessarily morally negative values. "Hellfire" is likely to rack up negative points in nearly any value system -- that is sort of the point. Noting that the fear of hellfire exists outside of a God-source morality is not, in my opinion, a strong argument against God-source morality. It could simply mean that another value system is in play.
That being said, one could proffer the idea that all value is moral value and that all moral value is from the God-source. Then I would agree that such a system could not explain the intrinsic fear of hellfire. But such a system would also describe the pain from touching a hot stove as a God-source evil. In essence, "God" would just be the answer to everything which isn't really an interesting problem to solve as a rationalist. But addressing a weakness of that system as an argument against a more typical God-source morality system seems misplaced.
I could, of course, be completely missing the point... in which case, oops. :) All thoughts, corrections, what-have-you are welcome. If I am wrong, I want to know.
Would you be willing to summarize your view in a couple sentences, even if doing so would result in a caricature of your position? The main idea I drew from your comment is that when we think about how murder is immoral, this feels like something different than just that murder is not in our best interest (even after folding in that we have self-interests in being altruistic).
Another way of putting this idea is that while I currently have no motive to murder --- you wrote:
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