Goodness Versus Morality and the Bible
So much of what is preached and publicized on behalf of Christian churches today consists of encouraging and sustaining morality as a basis of Christian theology. In fact, one might hear the proposal that morality is theology.
Morality is not theology because it consists, as Alan Watts wrote, "of telling people how to behave." Focusing on morality - telling people how to behave - does not impact public or private thinking except as it relates to control of behavior. So long as the emphasis is on morality the emphasis is on control.
Preaching morality rather than the virtues of goodness - particularly the common good we all ought to be seeking - gives us mostly sermons and exhortations limited to issues that are defined entirely by judgmental thinking.
Judgmental thinking in a religious or spiritual context drags the positive and negative aspects of human behavior into moral areas where actions are governed out of a concern for reward or punishment.
Judgmental thinking has at its core the idea of worthiness based on reward and punishment. Reward/punishment tools of fear, shame and guilt if ever used successfully, always result in the right things being done for the wrong reasons.
There is value in reward and punishment if the only goal is that of deterrence, intimidating those who would commit acts that would harm another person. In that regard deterrence is a device intended to discourage criminal activity.
This sort of spiritual construct only works if God is likewise viewed as judgmental and punitive, responding to human behavior in a manner that creates deterrence and control. Whether spiritual or civic, this control is legalistic in thinking - it is both spiritual and civic governance by the letter of the law.
It also exaggerates and escalates sin into the realm of criminal activity.
Subjugation to the letter of the law is precisely the environment into which Jesus was born and ministered, teaching the Christ Path as a divine alternative for a society totally immersed in literal and letter-of-the-law thinking. In that society, spiritual leaders had done something terrible to scripture, turning it into something primarily used as a device of control and deterrence.
Scripture had become formally canonized and was therefore primarily a tool of control. Sacred writings that inform humanity of its relationship to God lose most of their power to spiritualize individual lives when reduced to a canon of inflexible statutes, rigidity and possessed of a very narrow range of interpretation.
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