Morality

[Belacqua]

Sounds harsh, yes? But how could it be otherwise? We've all done things we know we should not have done. When we make bad choices, for a moral point of view, we do so not because of some honest mistake, but because we desire it more...we desire it even if we know it is not the wise choice, like sugar. That is the corruption of the flesh. Repentance is forgoing what is false, evil and ugly and thereby choosing what is good, true and beautiful.

So what if you did all that... tried to live a virtuous life according to your conscience, but not in reference to God, because you did not believe in God, what then?

I can answer this according to what Dante explains in the Divine Comedy. And since Dante is about 99% in accord with Thomist ethics what he says is fairly standard for Christian theology. 

According to these people, human beings all have an essence, or human nature, which is common to us all. Living a virtuous life is living in the way that is best for this nature, and allows the greatest flourishing for ourselves and others. 

Here Christian theology agrees with Plato, who wrote that we all desire what is best. We have a natural desire to live well and flourish. This is all about love, and living morally is ultimately loving the proper things in the proper amount. 

The clearest analogy is with a healthy diet. Science can tell us what is best for us to eat. This is not something we can choose for ourselves, or that differs according to society. Just because you happen to like potato chips more than anything else, and the TV commercials are telling you to eat potato chips to the exclusion of all else, doesn't mean it's healthy. Your physical nature can't be changed according to your personal taste or cultural differences. People are people. 

Ideally, we would love to eat a balanced healthy diet. I've heard people claim that if we were left alone, without advertising or artificial flavorings or whatever, we would just naturally choose all the best foods. I don't know if this is true or not, but as an analogy to Platonic ethics it's pretty good. If our personalities are not misinformed or deformed, we naturally desire to live well. 

As with a diet, other kinds of behavior have a natural balance which is determined by what human beings just are. Living morally means aiming your behavior toward that natural best outcome. Though there will be variations according to place and time, there is in fact one set of behaviors which suits human flourishing best. We are still in an ongoing debate as to many of the details. 

Immoral behavior is loving an unhealthy thing too much (as in Neo's example of sugar) or in loving healthy things too little (for example as someone who never exercises at all). Christian ethics is about loving passionately the proper things. 

People who live this way are living as "God wants." This last is in scare quotes, because it isn't really true to say that God wants anything. God is fully complete, with no lack, and so wants nothing. "God wants X" is allegorical language which means "X aims you toward what is best." 

From this you can see that people who aimed their lives toward what is best will be living in a Godly way, whether or not they've ever heard of God. Dante says specifically that when we wake up on Judgement Day, a lot of Christians are going to be surprised by who's ahead of them in line. 

As always, this theological view of things is different from the popular view of God as sky-daddy giver of arbitrary law. I've been told on this forum that I'm not supposed to talk about the more intellectual view because supposedly all the evil Christians in America don't know it. But if Dante said it so clearly then I don't think it's wrong to say that it's genuinely Christian.