Fundamental Moral Beliefs)
Almost all of God’s commandments to His children have been criticized and deemphasized in our modern Western culture. People constantly make excuses for lying, cheating, and stealing. Yet the one sin that is still largely considered a sin is that of killing. Even today, people tend to be largely against the idea of one person killing another. In fact, we have built many hedges around this sin, becoming suspicious of all sorts of violence, be it getting into a fight or spanking a child. In almost every context, it is simply considered unacceptable to cause physical harm to another person.
Is it any wonder, then, that we see the exceptions that God makes for killing, where He directly orders His people to put others to death for egregious sins, and we feel that He is violating moral law? We have created a “higher” god than God, one who demands a higher principle of non-violence than He does, and therefore God Himself is seen as a transgressor. He violates that “more supreme” ethic and is therefore immoral.
We may not think about it in such terms, but at the end of the day this is the moral hierarchy that leads atheists to mock the God of the Bible and Christians to gloss over uncomfortable chapters. Both hold an internal moral ideal by which even God Himself is judged. And that ideal is so fundamental that they do not have to think or reason about it. It is embedded in their hearts, causing an immediate and visceral revulsion to anything that stands against it. Many of us take such instincts as being axioms of truth. The fact that our revulsion is so strong and involuntary must mean that our own ideals are fundamental, beyond scrutiny, just eternal facts.
Taking a Step Back)
However, just because something feels fundamental doesn’t mean that it is. People can absolutely be cultivated to have immediate, visceral reactions that would not be there under another context. There are numerous examples of this, so let us mention a few. People that are raised around a particular race often feel unsettled when first seeing a person with another skin color, but had they been raised in a more diverse place no involuntary reaction would occur. People raised eating one country’s food may have an involuntary gag reflex when eating the food items of another country, though natives of that foreign land eat it without any trouble. A person raised to keep their room tidy will be deeply uncomfortable in the room of a pack rat, yet the pack rat feels absolutely relaxed in that setting. In each of these examples, we realize that these strong and involuntary negative reactions are not an indication of universal moral truth, but a result of conditioning.
This isn’t to say that all of our instincts are purely environmental. I believe that some of them truly do point to universal truth. But it is important to understand that the existence of the negative instinct is not proof in-and-of-itself that the reviled thing is immoral. We might just be out of tune.
When we are brought up in a strong culture, there are elements of it that are just too close for us to recognize. We have to take a step back and adjust our perspective to realize which things we just assumed to be true, but which might not have been. I would not expect anyone from my culture to read all of the death penalties that God assigned in the Old Testament and not feel that initial wave of revulsion. At this point those feelings are inevitable. But I do think it is worth considering whether those feelings are the result of eternal moral truth, or merely the conditioning of a particularly violence-avoidant culture.
