Originally Posted by
sport_122
It is very difficult to even start to talk about morality from the religion (or for me, the christian) perspective without talking about justice.
Morality from the human perspective does not work. This is demonstrated by justice systems all over the world. As the climate of society changes in a culture then so does the quality of its justice system along with this change is a shift in morality (look at Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia, southern states of America with regards to blacks and slavery, or Rome etc). So what happens when you want to base morality on the human perspective is that you get an ever changing system of rules. This eliminates the certainty aspect of law and leaves it open to corrupt interpretation. This is a part of the humanistic approach and has lead to some of the most horrible times in our recent history. This mentality has infiltrated the faith systems of our world and is what is usually the first thing that comes to mind when people discuss the legalistic nature of the Christian faith.
And all systems drive morality the same way. But what you call fear can be attributed to the idea of some of our hedonistic traits and the idea of a deterrent. This is not a manmade construct. We learned to do this because it is what God does with us. To demonstrate to us that He is Just and just as his law has not changed neither will his character. In fact, this is the very reason that we believe death comes to all men, because all men have broken the laws of an eternal God. Basically, both the hedonistic and deterrent principles tell us that people will seek out the road of less pain in order to achieve their goals of having more pleasure in life. These concepts guide justice systems around the entire world and they drive ALL concepts of morality. I believe this is for the reason I just stated, that we are acting not out of our development, but we are acting out of the fabric of our existence.
Even the very concept of justice is based off of these principles. Justice encompasses rule of law, punishment for breaking the law. Without the punishment for breaking any law, that law becomes void and is ignored. There is no punishment, there is no pain or nothing bad that will happen if you break the law, so you just do what you want to do. At that point there is NO justice and NO law. The opposite is what you see heavily demonstrated in religions, not because its about fear but because the laws are not subject to change as the ones made by humans. This is one of the reasons why I would argue that God is not dynamic, but he is very static. I would also argue that this is the problem that many in our society have with him, that his law is not subject to the same types of free passes as our court systems. And as we change, we really want our decline in morality to be supported by all, but the people who subscribe to a spiritual, eternal law cannot rightly make these changes. We cannot rightly say that we agree with homosexuality, we cannot say we agree with abortion, we cannot say we agree with many things because we believe the moral code of our universe is violated by these things.
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