The Moral Hazard of Unbelief
Belief in God, Heaven, and Hell prevents the moral hazard of secularism. The survival of Western Civilization depends upon the belief in an afterlife and what it takes to achieve it.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote:
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.”
In studying our founding documents, the Federalist Papers, and the private correspondence of the Founders, I have formed the opinion that they understood that two systems, one societal (moral) and one governmental (legal), were necessary for the maintenance of the American experiment in freedom.
This necessity is the reason that they expressly constrained the government from encroaching on the province of the moral through the Constitution, and the reason for the enumerated powers of the federal government and powers reserved for the states – the states being closer to the people. I believe that the wisdom of the Founders included the recognition that morality could not be legislated because it rested on the character and the belief system of the individual and that to regulate morality would be an unacceptable breach of individual freedom, a literal impossibility due to individual beliefs.
There are those who believe that Christianity should be an express component of our government: I am a Christian; I grew up in the Methodist faith and later in life became a Southern Baptist. While my life is informed by this and guided by God, I cannot find in the Constitution (in my own reading and understanding) any admonition to include any specific religiosity, however; I do strongly believe that both the Declaration and the Constitution were greatly influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition and that there are many enduring Judeo-Christian ethics enshrined in these documents.
It is also clear to me that they contemplated that just governance requires the existence of a moral society in parallel and that no government can overcome the consequences of an immoral society.
To that point, John Adams famously wrote:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Yesterday, I posted about Aristotle’s own recognition of something beyond reason that set things in motion, he called it God – not the same as the Christian God but based on the limits of argumentation and reason of the times, functionally the same concept.
As a Christian, I believe in the existence of God. While empirical proof of His hand in our affairs is elusive, I have experienced things in my own life that defy explanation, as well as learning of things on a far more global scale similarly have no empirical explanation, and yet they happened. These are legitimately viewed as miracles.
Here’s why I believe a belief in God, and by extension, a belief in an afterlife, is essential for the continuation of our Western form of civilization.
It has to do with the concept of moral hazard, the idea that people will act differently if there are no consequences of those actions than they will if there are. The challenges of living a “good life” are offset by tools developed over centuries of civilizations and codified in religious texts like the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Bible. While the details differ somewhat, the end goal is the same, to attain righteousness in the corporeal world, and ultimately to live on in spiritual bliss and harmony after the corporeal body expires – and when we reach that expiration date, we leave behind a world and a people better than we found them.
When God given moral and ethical guidelines are not followed, the punishment is the eternal damnation of your soul. So, in Judeo-Christian terms, we have the carrot and the stick if a system of rewards and consequences. People try to be good for the reward of eternal life, and risk eternal damnation if they are evil. That dichotomy leads to a consequential concern for what happens to us and those we leave behind after we die.
The secular humanist has no such concern. Their approach of rejecting the existence of God necessarily creates a regressive, hopeless, and terminal view of life. If you don’t believe in God or that He is good, you have no fear of destroying posterity nor do you fear an afterlife where there will be judgment to higher standards than man sets for himself in his world. Simple apathy or outright antipathy toward religion or God makes it easier for someone to believe that everything ends with their death, that there is only nothingness after. When there is no fear of losing a soul, it is much easier to run up balances on both the physical and metaphysical credit card to make your life easier today when you never intend to pay tomorrow.
That’s the moral hazard of non-belief.
Once again, I invoke Pascal’s Wager – from a logical standpoint, given the potential outcomes, are we better off to believe that God exists and His laws are valid and it turns out he doesn’t exist, or to not believe He exists and His laws are invalid, and it turns out he does exist. Pascal concluded that the risk to our souls is greater in the latter, so believing in God is the correct, and one might deduce, the empirical and reasoned choice.
This is the simple reason that God is necessary to Western Civilization, American liberty and “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitle us as American citizens.
Rather believe and find out I was wrong than the other way around...
During the current century the Democrat Party and affiliated groups appear to have embraced an actively hostile atheism and animosity to all things Judeo-Christian. In the past liberals would often appeal to the concept of the Fatherhood of G-d and the Brotherhood of Man. Imagine repeating that aloud among folk whose shibboleths include the words sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and anthropocentrism! So even though they reject the very concept of the spiritual the so-called progressives are soldiers of the darkness in a very real spiritual warfare against the Light of G-d and His Kingdom.