When we look at society today we can see that morality has gone out of style. In some areas, this is good, allowing a diversity of lifestyle, but in others, it is bad. For instance, where is the moral requirement, today, towards fighting criminal urges?
One possible reason for this decline in morality is said to be the decline of religious belief. But is it as simple as that? Can belief in a God-force really temper your urges? Most likely not, but a social spin-off of religion can.
GOD’S LAW
Today, when a person breaks the law, he is breaking man’s law. He is transgressing a set of rules devised by people to allow for an ordered society. If the transgressor doesn’t feel he belongs to that society, the ‘law’ allows no element to persuade him to be good.
Religion understood this. Hence, in the Ten Commandments we have laws, not made by man, but by God. This is more fundamental. Within the belief system, God had power over you whether you liked it or not.
The result of this was that you could not get away with transgressing God’s rules. Indeed, He was a fearful God, and the punishment for breaking His rules was Divine Retribution.
UNIVERSAL MORALITY
This was awesome, and didn’t just stop with life. The retribution would carry on after death, for you would answer to God for your life. And if He decided it hadn’t been very good, then it was down to eternal torment.
Intriguingly, this form of Divine punishment was not the sole property of Monotheistic religions. Consider the Hindu’s Karma. Here, if you did wrong, then you would answer for your life in the form your next incarnation took.
Hindu society even had an entire caste system to categorise everyone according to birth. This assisted Karma by showing that, in society, your next life had better be good, or you’d be stuck in a lower caste for eternity.
IT’S TRIBAL
We can see here that religion has always had a social off-shoot in a supernatural form of punishment. As civilization began to emerge we can argue that the system was required to keep societies coordinated. But it seems that the supernatural retribution idea is much older.
Tribal societies had their own moral rules in the totem, or taboo. But rather than being aimed at society, as such, the totem was a decree from the natural world, demanding that mankind respect the environment.
Punishment for disobeying the totem was total. For in not looking after nature, your food would decline, and in those days that meant starvation and possible extinction.
The first morality was, it seems, even more fundamental that Divine Retribution. But the important lesson here is that the first rules imposed on man were imposed by nature itself. In today’s world of global warming and pollution, this is wisdom from the ancients we should heed.
© Anthony North, Feb 2007
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