“God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes.”
That semicolon contains a big jump. Most people who believe in some higher power do identify that power with good, or morality, or perhaps merely as its source (morality is a gift from God, therefore, without him there would not be good). However, “there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes”—you seem to define that as to mean that most religious fundamentalists believe that without God, people are incapable of moral behavior. I’ve heard that applied strictly to the beliefs of some schools of thought within Islam and Calvinism, and loosely used to characterize the beliefs of such diverse figures as William of Ockham and Thomas Malthus.
The strict opinion that a person who does not believe in a judge that rewards and punishes is incapable of moral behavior is very rare among religious believers, fundamentalists (in either the literal or colloquial sense) included. It’s really a mistake to apply it as broadly as you are doing when you say “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.” as if that is what “religious” people largely believe.
More common is the idea, as expressed in the combox here, that lack of religious belief weakens morality. And, furthermore, the aphorism that you took as the starting point for this article “Without God, man cannot be good” the way you are using it is, in my experince, usually bandied about more as one does a theory, in an attempt to explain, for example, the brutality of twentieth century in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia, etc. Or the relationship between atheism in Europe and suicide.
“God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes.”
That semicolon contains a big jump. Most people who believe in some higher power do identify that power with good, or morality, or perhaps merely as its source (morality is a gift from God, therefore, without him there would not be good). However, “there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes”—you seem to define that as to mean that most religious fundamentalists believe that without God, people are incapable of moral behavior. I’ve heard that applied strictly to the beliefs of some schools of thought within Islam and Calvinism, and loosely used to characterize the beliefs of such diverse figures as William of Ockham and Thomas Malthus.
The strict opinion that a person who does not believe in a judge that rewards and punishes is incapable of moral behavior is very rare among religious believers, fundamentalists (in either the literal or colloquial sense) included. It’s really a mistake to apply it as broadly as you are doing when you say “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.” as if that is what “religious” people largely believe.
More common is the idea, as expressed in the combox here, that lack of religious belief weakens morality. And, furthermore, the aphorism that you took as the starting point for this article “Without God, man cannot be good” the way you are using it is, in my experince, usually bandied about more as one does a theory, in an attempt to explain, for example, the brutality of twentieth century in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia, etc. Or the relationship between atheism in Europe and suicide.