The group which is Religious by choice and practice likes to codify its list of behaviors into Good and Evil.
Instead of making the list a practical set of community values the stakes are raised to a Cosmic Consequence.
Do this or else! The "else" becomes a Divine Retribution which may reverberate well into all eternity!
The Jehovah's Witnesses are given arbitrary rules of conduct which may include life-threatening behaviors absolutely required by the Group.
Since Morality is a sense of what INCREASES THE VALUE OF LIFE--arbitrary rules which endanger life are the exact opposite!
Failure to allow your doctor to administer life-sustaining procedures because of a mind-control morality--is the opposite of actual morality.
Refusing to get a better education for yourself or your children decreases the good of a life well-lived and is the opposite of actual morality.
Any religious rule which induces a family to decrease its quality of life is clearly morally repugnant.
Carrying religious propaganda to your neighbors and strangers that contains arbitrary rules of behavior is immoral and unethical.
Why? You bind them to a life of servitude to capricious values that change according to human error. You instill a sense of fear and anxiety about the future which decreases their quality of life. In effect, you poison their sense of a good life well-lived.
Why would a Religious Group go to such lengths to pressure its members to submit to binding rules of religious morality?
There is only one possible answer.
The fastest and most efficient means of controlling others is FEAR. Fear of the Absolute creates Absolute Fear.
How does this work?
When you are dealing with invisible forces of an immeasurable magnitude you cannot actually grasp what you are dealing with.
A tornado or hurricane or typhoon or volcanic eruption is overwhelming and devastating. The destructive path is insuperable.
Similarly, the wrath of an angry Deity is not anything a frightened human can hide from, dissuade by argument or appease by sacrifice or promises.
The Absoluteness of Consequence is a very effective tool of CONTROL! Rational thought is replaced by a binding fear: DO THIS OR DIE!
Primitive societies quickly learned how to control others by fear alone rather than argument, debate, censure or persuasion.
Tribal Authority claimed representatives who spoke for God.
Do THIS or else.
Don't do THAT or else
The more horrifying the promised consequence or punishment the greater the fear engendered.
Just in case there were those who did not endorse belief in invisible Deity or afterlife punishments, the Tribal Authority who spoke for God
authorized stinging punishments for the here and now!
Humiliation, ostracism, lashing, fines, slavery, stoning, crucifixion--the list is practically endless.
Among the refined and civilized people of Athens in the the days of Socrates, public trials were held where the accused could answer and explain their actions and receive a sentence according to local law. Socrates himself was sentenced to drink poison for his irreverence and his efforts in misleading the Youth and his impiety.
In Christian history there have been severe crackdowns on free thinking, personal choice and unorthodox belief in the form of Inquisitions and torture, hangings and drownings and excommunications and banishments. All in the strenuous effort to ENFORCE MIND CONTROL.
In modern times, Christianity adopts the Ten Commandments and the preachments of Jesus and admonitions of Paul as its Morality.
Women are to be in subjection to men in violation of their personal rights and self-betterment. Children are insulated from ordinary society by homeschooling to enforce peculiar views of "science" and morality which excludes uncomfortable facts.
In the early days of America the Pilgrims might hang a man or woman who failed to attend Sunday services or banish them to the wilderness and certain death.
Binding belief by drastic fear of consequence has been the mainstay of religious endoctrination and authority.
Among Catholics heirarchy and Jehovah's Witness elders a more subversive sense of consequences is at work.
Cover ups and containment have often put the interests of the Organization above the harm done to the innocent in cases of child molestation.
Kingdom Halls may operate in an insular and arbitrary manner with summary Authoritarian pronouncements of silence or disfellowshipping.
The Question now becomes clear. Why do we need the rules of a Group Authority to give us our sense of what is MORAL?
The answer is even clearer. We do not.
What is practical and beneficial trumps what is authoritarian or invisibly mandated!
A person who leaves a group such as Jehovah's Witnesses is outside the arbitrary absolutes of self-imposed moral authority.
An EX-JW can relax their sense of doom and retribution at the hands of an Angry and Violent God.
Once outside the Kingdom Hall and away from the gloomy mind-control efforts of the self-authoritarian regime of the Governing Body
a former member can experience comple Freedom from FEAR itself!
Where does an EX-Jehovah's Witness turn for MORALS and ethical instruction?
The answer is simple and devoid of any connections to an absolute or invisible mystical or supernatural source.
RIGHT and WRONG become PRACTICAL once more!
You still can't harm others.
You still won't get away with mistreating your family, friends or other group.
You can't get by with stealing or lying or other such behaviors because no group will tolerate it.
Every day in every dealing with people your rule of life is practical and easily understood: "I won't do what I don't want done".
No Governing Body and no Judicial Committee can give you better or more transcendant morality than that!
We are FREE from the slavery to fear and Divine Consequences. Our choices become practical and from the heart because we CHOOSE THEM; they aren't forced upon us with resentment and doomsday attached.
FREEDOM brings personal choice.
SLAVERY brings enslavement to lists of rules.
You decide which is best!
Do we really need a list of what we can't do? Does such a list make us moral?
Won't the group we are a part of make wrong behaviors clear? Isn't a sense of fairness always present?
If one little kid takes another kid's lunch or pushes him down on the floor---won't the offended child make clear a "wrong" has been done?
Certainly.
If a person steals his friend's wife or drives his car without permission or even farts while others are eating---won't the consequences make very clear the magnitude of the "wrong"?
Certainly.
How we behave around other people is a PRACTICAL MATTER.
We draw the line and others draw the line in what will be tolerated and what will not.
From this practical code of ethics we derrive our sense of "right" and "wrong."
We don't need a list of rules in a practical society......because:
MORALITY IS SIMPLY A MATTER OF PRACTICALITY
What is morality, or ethics?
It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.
Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.
Why does man need a code of values?
Right and Wrong become less idealistic and more practical as we grow up in a family and a society.
In any group we are in (family, schoolmates, friends, business associates) there are things we cannot do and get away with it.
Lying, stealing, mistreating, misleading, ignoring.....meet with definite reactions and consequences. No group anywhere will put up with these things for very long. The consequences will vary in intensity and impact depending on the severity of your behavior.
But, the bottom line is practical: you can't get away with harm to others. (Those who try must form insular sub-groups called gangs. These gangs are clearly outlaws.)
