A Fixed Point of Reference

Can morality exist without God? Can there be absolute truths, good and bad, right and wrong without edicts from an Almighty? If not, who is to say which Almighty and which religious books we believe and follow? Hmmm, good questions. The answers should be even more interesting. Let’s think this through. For the sake of argument let’s stipulate that there is no God and no body of heavenly directives. When a group of people come to live in close proximity and form a society, human nature being what it is; there will be crime. Some people will take property from others and do bodily harm upon them. The victim will say to the aggressor that I don’t like that, it hurts me and it is wrong for you to do this. Yes, we can all agree that the victim doesn’t like it. We can also agree that it harms the victim. But, how do we say that it is wrong. Maybe the aggressor likes it, he gets a perverse satisfaction from the act and he is not harmed but rather rewarded with the stuff that he has stolen. He might say that what he did was not wrong, but very right for him. So how do we resolve this clash of right vs. wrong? Remember, there is no God or Bible and there are no laws yet. It’s just one person’s word and preference against another’s. So, the victim goes to his neighbors and exhorts them to band together to pass laws proscribing such behavior and punishing those who violate the laws. But, they ask; upon what basis do we make our decisions about which activities shall be deemed illegal and which shall not? Well, those activities which harm others should be illegal he responds. But the aggressor says that he was not harmed, but improved but his activities against you. So if we simply put to a vote of the people (pure democracy) it comes down to how many victims vs. aggressors happen to live in the society at the time of the vote. The determination of what is to be defined as right and wrong is merely left to the number of people lined up on either side. Too many aggressors and right is wrong and wrong is right, sort of. This is the tyranny of the majority over the minority in a pure democracy (devoid of a constitution or overarching set of guiding principles, e.g. The Holy Bible). Morality thus becomes relative and potentially ever-changing. A fixed point of reference that it always moving.
OK, we could say that only encounters and activities that harm neither party are allowed. If either or both parties are harmed the activity is illegal. We are now faced with defining harm. And we are now right back where we started from. How do we define harm? Remember, the aggressor in our scenario argues that he was not harmed. His concern for his victim is nil. If there are enough of these aggressors in the society, when the vote on the definition of harm comes, how do we think they will vote? We have made no progress.
Well, let’s look to our history and traditions for guidance. Oops, this is a new society with no historical tradition. Well some things are just so heinous that they are obviously wrong. Based upon your opinion that may be the case. And it may be the opinion of most members of society, but probably not all. And I would agree that some things are so bad that it just seems to make sense that they should be disallowed. But we are still relying upon the vote of the majority. It’s that tyranny of democracy thing again and such decisions don’t have real lasting power. They are relative and change over generations. It’s hard to order society when the targets keep getting moved around.
It’s beginning to look like we need some sort of outside supreme force to set some absolute truths and guardrails to guide our lawmaking process. These would be non-changing non-negotiable tenets. The only rules which meet those requirements that I know of come from God. But now we must decide whose God and which spiritual writings we accept. The good news here is that most of the recognized religions of the world have many similar absolute teachings on the basics of human life. That’s not to say that people and people groups over the years have not distorted and misapplied these teachings and caused harm to come to people. However, that is not a failing of the teachings but rather of human nature. That we sometimes abuse the doctrine does not indict or nullify the usefulness of the doctrine.
So I say that the only and best solution is for our society to select (yes by popular vote understanding the whole democratic tyranny thing but realizing that there really is no bad choice here for the reason stated in the last paragraph, whew) one of the religious doctrines, base their constitution and laws upon it and stick with it. Period. There really is no other rational choice. It’s the best path available to imperfect human beings in my opinion.
For the United States of America that choice is the Christian religion, derived from Judaism. These are the principles codified in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.