God doesn't have a monopoly on goodness

--Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?

God certainly is good, however all things good don’t necessarily find their roots in God. Our physical existence enables us to experience the world through our senses and to declare at a very visceral level that some things are good simply because they make us feel good. There is a cause and effect to good and evil, right and wrong, that doesn’t require an understanding of God in order to fully appreciate the differences between the two. We’ve rather successfully taught our excitable young dog right from wrong but we’ve made much less progress on developing his concept of the divine!

However beyond the personal definition and experience of good and evil there is the community experience which actually shapes a significant portion of our moral and ethical perspective. Our morals and ethics are grounded in a belief in some “thing” greater than we are, but that “thing” can be the family we grew up in, the neighborhood we live in, the city we vote in, etc. It doesn’t necessarily have to be God.

The community craves good and employs strategies to increase the common good, including punishing those who behave in ways that are harmful to the community. The community to which we belong shapes our sense of right vs. wrong – and they let us know in no uncertain terms where the boundaries are. And just as an individual can physically experience good and evil, so can the community in the form of uncontrollable, unexplainable human or “natural” events. When these uncontrollable events are bad we tend to label them as “evil” and to seek a place to lay the blame. In my experience we are very happy to take all the credit for good but then to look outside the community to identify the source of evil.

And this is where religion and God often enter the picture. In seeking to explain the unexplainable suffering and hardship that will eventually occur in any community we name God as the one with enough power to have caused this tragedy – and then look at each other to figure out what someone among us did to incur God’s wrath. The witch hunt for the agent of evil begins. But that doesn’t make good and evil a religious issue but rather we turn to religion to help make sense of the evil in particular that we observe in the world.