Religion as Crowd Control

Periodically, our Chattering Classes, in between loudly declaiming that atheists can be as moral as anybody else and religion has nothing to do with morality, suddenly notice that religion tends to have a lot to do with morality. It turns out that, while atheists *can* be moral people, in real life, religious devotion to a personal God who love you tends to be a much better engine to motivate people to be good than a mere generalized ethic that niceness is nice.

Of course, the Religion as Crowd Control Approach tends to get everything all bass-ackwards as a result of such findings and the result is a curiously sterile approach. Basically, it consists of unbelieving technicians acknowledging what you knew: which is that a serious practice of ethical monotheism tends to result in cultivation of various virtues that make society run smoother. The problem is, the technician knows in his heart that you can’t fake believe in God for the sake of a smoothly running society. Given enough time, it might even be possible for such people to figure out that you also can’t fake being ethical when you know (or believe) that you live in a nihilist void where the only thing that really matters is getting caught if its a choice between what you badly want and doing evil to get it.

The question that never seems to enter the heads of the unbelieving technicians in such stories is “Might it be possible that there is something, you know, *true* about all this ethical monotheism stuff? Might a supernatural God actually exist and could he possibly have revealed himself through, oh, say, Jesus Christ or somebody like that?” Instead, you just get technicians sort of lurking around the edge of ethical monotheism but never daring to wonder where human beings get the power to do things that are not normal for creatures as selfish as we are.