Goodness Versus Morality and the Bible - Suite101.com: So much of what is preached and publicized on behalf of Christian churches today consists of encouraging and sustaining morality as a basis of Christian theology. In fact, one might hear the proposal that morality is theology.

Morality is not theology because it consists, as Alan Watts wrote, “of telling people how to behave.” Focusing on morality - telling people how to behave - does not impact public or private thinking except as it relates to control of behavior. So long as the emphasis is on morality the emphasis is on control.

Preaching morality rather than the virtues of goodness – particularly the common good we all ought to be seeking – gives us mostly sermons and exhortations limited to issues that are defined entirely by judgmental thinking.

Judgmental thinking in a religious or spiritual context drags the positive and negative aspects of human behavior into moral areas where actions are governed out of a concern for reward or punishment.

Judgmental thinking has at its core the idea of worthiness based on reward and punishment. Reward/punishment tools of fear, shame and guilt if ever used successfully, always result in the right things being done for the wrong reasons.

There is value in reward and punishment if the only goal is that of deterrence, intimidating those who would commit acts that would harm another person. In that regard deterrence is a device intended to discourage criminal activity.

This sort of spiritual construct only works if God is likewise viewed as judgmental and punitive, responding to human behavior in a manner that creates deterrence and control. Whether spiritual or civic, this control is legalistic in thinking – it is both spiritual and civic governance by the letter of the law.

It also exaggerates and escalates sin into the realm of criminal activity.

Subjugation to the letter of the law is precisely the environment into which Jesus was born and ministered, teaching the Christ Path as a divine alternative for a society totally immersed in literal and letter-of-the-law thinking. In that society, spiritual leaders had done something terrible to scripture, turning it into something primarily used as a device of control and deterrence.

Scripture had become formally canonized and was therefore primarily a tool of control. Sacred writings that inform humanity of its relationship to God lose most of their power to spiritualize individual lives when reduced to a canon of inflexible statutes, rigidity and possessed of a very narrow range of interpretation.

Because a canon is essentially a conservative document, a document that has been canonized is a document of censorship. It preserves the benefits of those already in authority at the expense of the culture itself. It lets the controllers retain control.

The Bible as we have it today was an instrument of control for that portion of early Christianity that won a victory of political survival. The Bible became a tool of those specific victorious Christian leaders and a means by which conservative manipulation of the status quo was more important than the spread of the philosophy of the Sermon on the Mount, The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan.

The controlling priests ignored that philosophy, building instead a monarchical vision of God that capitalized on the wrathful God of the Old Testament and blended it with the imperial power and imagery of the Caesars and Roman civil administration.

Jesus did not preach a Compassionate God in the punitive monarchical sense that pervades Christianity even today. The monarchical god as seen by fundamentalist and literal-minded Christian practitioners today is an inheritance passed on from the original Roman Priesthood augmented by the governance model of the Roman Empire...