Does morality require a supernatural foundation? That is, can there be moral obligation without God?

Over the course of months that I’ve been taking this course, we’ve talked a lot about morality.  The laws of morality determine whether we are doing something right or wrong throughout the course of our daily actions.  Who determines these actions?  What happens to us when we do something “morally wrong”?  Do we get punished?  Who determines the punishments?  I strongly believe that god (or the belief in a higher power) determines how we function as a society to determine our moral guidelines in this day and age.

I’d like to divert your attention to our “Religion and Ethics Part One” quiz where you had us outline the argument from George Mavrodes for the claim that morality requires god.  George Mavrodes was obviously a very smart and well-decorated man who published hundreds of articles talking about topics like the one that I’ve selected.  What intrigues me about Mavrodes is that he made the claim that morality cannot exist without religion.  Religion appears to be the grounds of everything we do now.  If we do something wrong, we are judged by a superior power.  But what if there isn’t a superior power or some set of moral guidelines to prove to us what is right or wrong?  Who decides that?  God does.   Why though? Why does god decide what is right or wrong.  That’s because this country and god are linked.  In our Pledge of Allegiance, we say one crucial line: “One nation under God.”  This shows that we are to abide by gods universal law of being loving, justified and moral to one another.  America is all one big example of Christian ideology that we have been keeping in hiding for centuries.   When you think about it, God is the only possible way to find a moral duty in this life (he showed this through his commandments) and the only way to find moral values in life (through love and charity.)  God has given us everything that we could need in terms of determining the good from the evil.

The afterlife is an interesting thing, is it not?  Who knows what will happen after we die.  But for some reason, it is some sort of an “end goal.”  Why is that?  Because we don’t want to believe that nothing happens after we die.  We want to be able to get into Heaven and not into Hell.  Why should we even believe in Heaven or Hell though?  What’s the point if we don’t believe in God?  To tell you the truth, there isn’t one.  So that plagues a question into my mind:  What’s the point of being moral and civil if there is nothing to look forward to after we die?  Why don’t we just go around committing mass murders and robberies everywhere we go if we don’t believe in some sort of ethereal placeholder where our soul will be laid to rest?  Was it not God’s 6th commandment where he said, “Thou shalt not murder”?  What does an atheist care what god declared if he doesn’t even believe in him or better yet, why should he have to follow some imaginative rules?  Simply put, there isn’t a reason for non-believers to not be criminals, because there simply isn’t consequences that define where we go when we die.  The only possible reason I could think of for not wanting to murder someone when you’re not apart of this “code” is that this is your only life.  If you lose this one life and nothing happens when you die, then it’s over.

In summation, I strongly standby my own opinion in that there is a higher power involved in morality.  Without this higher power, there would be no clear, cookie-cutter definition of what is right or what is wrong in this world.  If we didn’t follow these outlined creations by God, people would just be running around rampantly doing whatever they pleased because there is simply nothing left for them on the other side.