What is Morality, Anyway?

I started dissecting Andrew Yang's statement about the ridiculousness of people's beliefs about atheists and morality a couple of days ago. I'll admit, I'm already losing a bit of interest in it... mainly because there's so freaking much to critique and that seems pretty tedious. And we all know how I feel about tedious projects. (Okay, I see this self-referential tendency of blogging has come back pretty quickly to me.)

Anyway, I will go slightly into the next phrase of his statement, but allow me to make this disclaimer: there's a lot to unpack about the topic, and I'm not pretending or interested in exhausting the topic. I'm going to do a pretty cursory analysis on the topic of morality. It will leave a ton to be desired. You may walk away from this thinking it was the stupidest post you've read in quite a while, but this is what I'm willing to give, so you can take it or leave, as they say. (Who says that? No one really. But I am right now.)

Okay.

"people would think you are somehow less moral...because of your religious beliefs"

This is the next phrase. Remember, he thinks it's ridiculous that people would think this. I already discussed that I think the fact that he thinks it is ridiculous means that he probably hasn't investigated it very much. Or at least hasn't talked to people with the strongest arguments for this viewpoint.

This next phrase really solidifies that belief for me. Here's why:

While some religions might teach morals as an outward act, many view it as a combo double-punch package of outward action plus inward motivation. Some also add the impact created as a factor in how moral something is. That is, if the action is good or neutral and the intention is good, but the outcome is negative, this might rank lower on the morality scale.

But since we are talking about an American running for the highest office in the land, I'd like to put the context a little bit more specifically on the Judeo-Christian... er, actually just Christian... perspective of how a person comes to be moral.

It's kind of simple, honestly. This is a quality of Christian that we take pride in, so to speak. Except that pride is a sin, so ... we take whatever satisfaction or fulfillment in it that wouldn't be a sin. We like that our faith is simple. This is seen as a positive from the Christian point of view.

Romans 14:23 says, "Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin."

The immediate context of this statement is discussing whether Christians need to maintain a kosher diet, but the principle is relevant in anything we do.

So, from a biblical, Christian standpoint, a person that is not acting from faith in Christ is always acting in sin. Therefore, they are always immoral, even when doing nice things that have positive earthly benefits.

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