It seems to me that with or without religion good people will behave well and bad people will do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
So said Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in
an interview on PBS (in the early 1990's, I think, but I couldn't confirm it).
"Still," comments John Allen Paulos, in his instructive little book,
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up:
people do often vigorously insist that religious beliefs are necessary to ensure moral behavior. Though the claim is quite clearly false of people in general, there is a sense in which it might be true if one has been brought up in a very religious environment. A classic experiment on the so-called overjustification effect by the psychologists David Greene, Betty Sternberg, and Mark Lepper is relevant. They exposed fourth- and fifth-grade students to a variety of intriguing mathematical games and measured the time the children played them. They found that the children seemed to possess a good deal of intrinsic interest in the games. The games were fun. After a few days, however, the psychologists began to reward the children for playing; those playing them more had a better chance of winning the prizes offered. The prizes did increase the time the children played the games, but when the prizes were stopped, the children lost almost all interest in the games and rarely played them. The extrinsic rewards had undercut the children's intrinsic interest. Likewise, religious injunctions and rewards promised to children for being good might, if repudiated in later life, drastically reduce the time people spend playing the "being good" game. This is another reason not to base ethics on religious teachings. [pp. 140-141]
Fortunately, my own reasons for giving up God and religion were fundamentally moral. My moral values remained intact and may even have been fortified because of my realization that I alone am responsible for the morality of my actions and, ultimately, for who I am.
Besides, I know a number of people whose moral sensibility seems to me superior to God's as "He" is portrayed in the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions.
By Moristotle
