How Does God Give Us Morality

There are many reasons to why God contribute to our morality. Here are just some reasons.

1) God is a parental figure to us. Both the fatherly and the motherly figure.

The fatherly side of God gives us morality for this reason:

We human are innately imperfect, fallible, and prone to make mistakes. This goes into the root of our being. Human has a dark side – the deviant/evil side. Many people would agree that human are good, kind, caring, and compassionate. But we can not discount that human can be evil, deceitful, and cruel.

The dark side of us, or the rebellious/sinful nature of us is cautious of the fatherly figure of God just like a child is cautious of his father – he would be cautious and not do what his father does not approve of. Thus, when we are in a situation where we are tempted or have an opportunity to engage in a deceitful/sinful/wrongful act – we would more likely to reframe from it knowing that God would not approve of it.

The motherly side of God also gives us morality. The kindness, the goodness, the patience, and the compassion of God cause us to act in kindness, to be good, to be patient, and to be compassionate to others. We stride to do acts that would be in obedience to God, because we know that is what God would want us to do. This obedience is not done out of fear, but done out of deep reverence and respect.

2) We learn by example:

Why do we instinctually say God is good, or God is benevolent? We associate God with goodness. God is a teacher figure. Having that ultimate teaching figure as the source of goodness provides us an exemplar to emulate, because we learn by example. Having God as that figure of goodness compels us to do the same to emulate Her. Think of a child who learns from his father and mother. Having God as that source as an exemplar adds to our morality.

3) Even though we cannot explicitly show how God gives us morality, but we can see the effects of it by looking at our current secular culture. In the last decade or two, our collective culture has experienced sharp rise in secularism and the moving away from God. It’s not hard to see that a world without God leads to more chaos, disorder, and moral decay. Mental illness, loss of community, break down of the family, cheating, narcissism, vulgarity, selfishness, greed, debauchery, lascivious behaviors, and the list goes on. I think we have had enough time to see that a godless world is failing us – and that it isn’t the right way.

On a related note about the dark side of us or the imperfect nature of human:

In our culture today, we often hear this phrase: “be your authentic self.”

Be your authentic self is only half correct, because we are made of the two selves – the good self (Love) and the deviant self (Fear/Opposite of Love). In certain cases, we should reframe from being our authentic self if that self is of the deviant self.

We should be careful about embracing all of our desires, urges, feelings that arise from within. Because some of these desires and urges could be coming from the deviant/false self. Urges such as anger, hatred, jealousy, greed, perversion, violence, revenge are all the natures of the deviant/evil/sinful self. And if we mistakenly identify with this “authentic self” and allow this entity to become who we are, then we would be doing our self a disservice, as these urges ultimately draw us toward darkness and suffering.

Our current secular culture does not recognize the deviant self within men – or that men has a sinful/evil side. We won’t read in biology books that human has an evil side. This is because evil is not scientific. Also the term evil begins to invoke on spirituality, religion, and God – which is considered supernatural and superstitious.

Recognizing this deviant/sinful/imperfect self within us is key because it is the first step toward applying self awareness, discipline, and humility to keep our deviant self in check.

In Christianity, they use the word “sinner” to describe this evil/selfish/fallible entity within us. This word may sound condescending and judgmental, but feelings aside – that is an accurate word to describe who we are because there is that evil/dark/selfish potential within us. And it is right to label it with a word that is succinct and precise so that we are aware of it for us to apply self awareness and self-discipline. The more vigilant we are of our sinful nature the less mistakes we make, and therefore the less suffering we experience because sin ultimately leads us to suffering.