I'd like to credit Division by Zero of ProBoards Support for inspiring this article. ^_^
Theists like to see it as their purpose here on earth to convert prospective individuals to their belief system for the benefit of the religious collective, but ultimately, themselves. Proponents of this aspect of theistic morality -- call it "saving the infidels" if you wish -- accept their faith initially for the rewards of paradise with God and divine knowledge gracefully bestowed upon them by the correct deity of their choosing. For the argument I will forward two contentions to the apt-styled "Salvation Dilemma". The first is that any selfishness implied in accepting a reward of paradise is negated by virtue of what we can call a "morally right" act to perform. The second contention is that rewards being conferred upon His creation as per carrying out morally right acts have no real purpose as far as most of the options I can explore seem to point to.
The first contention is a counter to the counter-argument espousing that accepting God on your own or another's behalf is selfish. This is true. However, the argument is inconsequential because any further moral objection the proposal attempts to push forward is negated by the circumstance that there is no morally better alternative to take. If we suppose for a moment that we are given a choice to accept Jesus and subsequently become the passive recipient of divinely bestowed knowledge, or reject Jesus and face an eternity of hellfire and torture below the deepest cores of the earth, it becomes clear that there are two moral choices, and such that those two are the most moral choices we can elect to undertake. Electing to accept the first option given to us is indeed selfish, for one seeks to reap the benefits of the Kingdom of God which its proponents purport it to possess.
However, we cannot necessarily refuse this option on the grounds that the contrary is selfish. Firstly, the Judeo-Christian God -- ignoring his omniscience for the benefit of this example -- wishes for us to accept Him. He knows that accepting this option entails the benefits enumerated in the Bible. In other words, he is aware of and wishes us to accept reward for our benefit. In a typical situation where selfishness is involved, one would imagine that we are presented with a morally better option to take that dispells any selfishness that taking another option would produce. In short, the argument espouses that accepting Jesus is a means to an end rather than a morally good end-of-itself, and hence why any theist is selfish by virtue of electing to accept Jesus. This is incorrect. If we are to look at this potential consequence through this filter, we see that the "end" being alluded to -- the consequence -- is paradise. The "means" through which we reach this consequence is accepting Jesus.
The means and the end exist in any moral dilemma. But the 'means' only matter if they can be objectively weighed in their concurrency with morality when electing a choice. That is to say, a choice by which its form is a means-to-an-end presupposes that the means is undesirable to perform to reach that consequence. If a means is undesirable to perform to reach a consequence, we should also have a means presently existing that is more desirable to perform. Otherwise, we can't claim the choice is any real means-to-an-end as could be used in a moral dilemma where a third morally good-of-itself option presently exists.
If the means is not undesirable by any extenuating circumstance in which a dilemma is presented to us, then the fact that this is another means to an end situation does not make electing to accept Jesus morally despicable because the end consequence can only ever be presented entailing this means by which we reach our goal. In short, the Godhead cannot dilute our options to us in terms that facilitate a more ethical choice to make, because there is no more ethical choice to make -- this is the best choice we can undertake because it's a part of the final dilemma we face before facing either an afterlife of torture or one of reward. It's the most morally good choice because it's the only final morally good choice to make.
The notion that it's selfish to accept Jesus because of the rewards entailed is inconsequential -- the choice is morally good in itself, because it's the only objectively morally good choice presented to us. The fact that the choice may be described as 'selfish' is not so in a degenerative context because God wishes for us to seek advancement in His Name, and thus the choice is the most ethical to make since it affirms his wishes for our advancement. There is presumably no down-side to accepting Him in consequence, so any negative connotation associated with that word also has no bearing in that respect.
If the attribute had any real bearing on the status of its concurrency with morality here, we would be presented with an option that it is less selfish to take that produces the same consequences. There is none, so why refuse to accept Jesus on this and tacitly accept Satan and face an eternity of hellfire? That is the most morally despicable option, and although we are endowed with freewill -- supposing God exists for sake of argument -- by our Creator, God won't have it. In short, a selfish pretext presupposes a morally better alternative to take because awaiting the consequence is selfish. Accepting Jesus is good in itself because it's the most moral option to take -- thus although superficially it seems to be a selfish choice, the objection has no bearing as the choices are presented to us.
The dilemma is indeed a means-to-an-end, but there is no other means to take that affirms that this particular means-to-an-end is despicable, and by extension, that the choice is undesirable to take. And such why although it seems selfish to take this reward in return for accepting Jesus, it's not morally despicable, thus negating any morally-despicable connotation the word has attached with it. The fact that the choice seems selfish has no affect on its concurrency with its objective morality. I suppose this would be a good argument for a theist to use in defending their choice in accepting Jesus on their own behalf.
On the flip-side, my second contention to the "Salvation Dilemma" seems to be more nihilistic in its nature. The best way for me to describe it in brief, is that subscribing to a divinely prescribed set of morality is meaningless because such edicts can never be proven to be good of themselves. Let us imagine for a moment, the Ten Commandments. These rules comprise a set of divinely appointed and thus objectively moral edicts, supposing once again that God exists and that our choices in believing in Him or not actually have a bearing on where we go after death as a principle. If these rules are truly good in themselves, why does God feel he needs to reward us for performing 'morally good' acts?
The rewards shouldn't even be a part of the equation if these acts carry some intrinsic value. However, it's erroneous to assume that these rewards assign value to morally good acts. They could very well reinforce any intrinsic value held within them. But why does God wish to pander to our selfishness by rewarding us with paradise and divine knowledge in return for adhering to them? What use is reinforcing what we ought to hold true if we believe? My idea here is that morality's nature on the metaphysical level is either one out of a few possibilities.Consequently, the purpose of reward for subscribing to this set of morality changes with each possibility.
The first possibility is that morality is objective in accordance with the nature of the Universe. That is, a morally right act will always be beneficial to carry out, and the act is good in itself because it does no harm to carry out what it intends to. Since we assume here that the Universe was brought into existence by God, he henceforth set the necessary conditions for morally right acts to always produce the appropriate consequences in accordance with the act's nature. What good, supposing morality is absolute of itself, is reinforcing this innate quality with rewards to satiate our selfish pretexts?
Can he not get us to perform morally good acts any other way? If he is all powerful, surely he can find a less crude way to carry out these divine edicts. There is no defense in asserting the contrary that humans are imperfect, and thus, God must pander to our imperfections to get us to do what he wants. If He designed us, one would expect he needn't have to give such rewards to get us to carry out his proclamations of what's good and what's evil, and to follow one set and abstain from the other. The rewards are superfluous, assuming the innate goodness can serve its purpose to its fullest potential.
The second possibility is that rewards serve a greater use not by merely reinforcing some innate moral quality, but expanding on it. That would mean that although the acts are morally good in themselves, the effectiveness of subscribing to and carrying out these moral acts changes with the medium by which these acts are carried out -- in this case, we contrast a human's and a deity's ability to carry out an innate moral act to its greatest potential. A moral act can only go so far to be beneficial as a human can strive to produce the greatest positive moral benefit from performing a moral act. A deity, in contrast, can perform the same innate moral act and extend it to its fullest potential to permeate all dominions of the nature of its creation.
In any describable instance of innate morality to be observed from carrying out an act that produces such a consequence of itself, we would expect that given the multitude of acts to be carried out that can be measured on a moral scale, that even the least morally good act by virtue of it giving rise to the least beneficial consequence, would still be beneficial. This to say that all beneficial acts are such after a measurable cut-off point on the 'moral scale'. However, the best innate moral act that can be performed by a human pales in comparison to the infinitely greater innate moral acts that can be carried out by God. As such, God wishes for us to appreciate the value of our work by rewarding us as there is a clear discrepancy of moral goodness between the acts that can be carried out by us. This means that the rewards serve as equalizers -- they allow us to perform acts of ultimately the same measurement of moral goodness as we are created equally in His image as the Bible claims us to be, as only divine acts are worth divine reward.
The third possibility is that there is no truly innate moral quality to be found in any of the Ten Commandments or any other subsequently prescribed moral edict. This is why God would reward us -- the rewards assign value to what we do. He simply designated some laws and told us to adhere to them, otherwise we'd be punished accordingly. However, this is nonsensical as there is no point to adhere to them other than for selfish purposes, and if the rewards serve to satiate our selfishness, the acts themselves are inherently selfish even if they produce a moral benefit. If there is no value divulged to assess whether or not a particular set of morals is worth adhering to, there is no use in rewarding us because we would imagine the rewards reflect some innate value found in those edicts which we have carried out.
The fourth possibility is that any knowledge of why God would reward us is forsaken for we would not be able to ever understand it as we are in our present state of being. This somewhat makes sense given the conflicts considered in scenarios one and two. Although I'd imagine one wouldn't refuse the reward simply because it serves no utility as per principle in those two scenarios, it may resolve some subsequent sense of guilt that we'd experience otherwise had God not forsaken any knowledge of why he'd reward us. Though, if we are not destined to glean the meaning behind why he'd give us rewards in the first place, it's essentially the same as those rewards not having any value -- which reflects the situation in scenarios one and two in the human perspective. Perhaps in attempting to negate a larger dissonance, God calculates that it's better to forsake one kind of knowledge to us as opposed to allowing the contrary and somehow leave us conflicted as to what purpose these edicts serve if they have no innate moral quality of themselves.
I am not here to say that any of these possibilities have any equal ground with one another, or that these are the only options available. There are certainly an abundance of positions to take on the issue of rewarding moral acts if said acts are innately good in themselves. These are simply solutions I've been exploring if we assume God exists, but if he does not, I would say the rewards enumerated in the Bible serve as a method of subjugating the masses to be subservient to self-proclaimed divine edicts for the selfish purposes of those in power in early day Christianity -- because as if seeking objective morality was hard enough, why assume a God exists in the first place? I would prefer to use Occam's Razor when addressing the issue and say that none of the possibilities here given are sufficient explanations for why God would choose to reward us for performing moral acts.
Instead, I will and have always taken the stance that morality is subjective, and the rewards entailed for performing moral acts here on earth are such because other people think these people need to be served in reciprocity in accordance to the perceived value of the act. Perhaps though, if God exists, that reciprocity is the reason He so chooses to reward morality -- assuming all innate moral acts to be performed are no less equal and no more greater than the last or one after. I also believe this is the position that most Christian theists take. Even though the act of God bestowing reward upon his subject is hard to explain in some respects, it certainly casts a light on what it means to be selfish, to be good, and if the rewards are necessary for us to be good in the first place.
