Summary
This essay critically examines the concept of altruism toward God as presented in Christian theology, particularly the expectation of total selflessness in serving God. It explores the implications of such a belief, arguing that it can distort human morality by redirecting selfless love away from people toward a deity who, by definition, has no needs. The essay challenges the moral framework grounded in divine authority, suggesting it often relies on force, fosters extremism, and risks becoming a "necessary evil" rather than a true good. It also questions the integrity of morality when tied to religious belief and argues for a more spontaneous, human-centered understanding of goodness.
THE ARGUMENT
Jesus Christ said you must love God for his own sake and be willing to give up all for his sake. Thus you are to be 100% altruistic towards God. Imagine that you have to be altruistic to God or man and there is no alternative. It has to be one or the other. Clearly then Jesus' teaching says you must choose God. When you help man, it is not about helping man but pleasing God. Belief in God is extremist then in this way. It is extremist in this implication.
Extremism sows seeds of new forms of extremism. It does that anyway. And we help it to.
God belief at best would be a necessary evil. A necessary evil is never to be accepted or celebrated. It still harms and proving it was really necessary may be impossible.
Offering the good you do that helps others, altruistically to such a God is terrible.
And even more so when he has no needs.
Most of us agree with altruism for people out there may need help from us. Whatever this divinely orientated version is, it is not altruism in that sense. It comes across as hating humanity so deeply that selfless love is channelled to a God instead - and that distraction enables the performing of good for others.
Imagine if God gives you the gift of being altruistic towards others. Can this mean I will just help the other even if it means taking no account of him and that is his work behind it all? A God who wants a relationship with you will not let this happen. You will have some clue. You will sense it is a gift even if you don't know the how or why or who. In fact if you search within and see nothing to that effect then you can say that your lived experience shows there is no God. Having no evidence that anybody is there does not mean there is really nobody there. But this is not the same thing. It is about you knowing yourself. If you need God he will not give a gift without letting it show how much he loves you and wants you and he to be friends even father and child. God by definition is needed. So we see that God gives you the gift of altruism towards others so that you can, in awareness, serve him this way.
Altruism praises the soldier who leaps on a grenade and dies horribly to save his friends. The altruist could commit suicide so that others may have her organs and live. Altruism is intrinsically open to such behaviour and the altruist who denies this is a liar. But if you are going to be altruistic, it is better to be altruistic for people and then animals. Being altruistic to God is intolerable. And yet you are expected to be fully selfless where he is concerned!
Christianity says your body belongs to God not you. Paul writes that in addition to that, God owns you if you are Christian for you are bought and paid for by the death and blood of Jesus Christ. The image of God talk means that God decides who you are and what you must do for you belong to him as his reflection. Thus God then has the right to command you to die so others can have your organs.These risks and implications show that a morality based on God then is not really a morality.Even if God were the same as objective morality, could he reveal it to man considering we are going to use it as a crutch for we hate morality and have to force ourselves to give it any honour? No.
We do force ourselves to be moral even in some twisted way. For example, we need to be loyal to our gang if we are going to rob a bank. Notice how this is a group coming together to force themselves. By implication each member is standing for force and taking away the freedom of others in the group.
But morality itself forces itself on us too. It just does. For example, if we say there is no justice or wrongdoing then we say it is unjust and wrong to condemn those who say we are wrong.
As Nietzsche taught, being moral in any sense - real or distorted - leads to the temptation to bully those who differ from our standards or fall short. We end up willingly or unwillingly distorting the truth in order to stigmatise them.
If you think you have the good creator on your side that will only make the temptation worse. Morality feeds on a drive for power anyway so that is no surprise.
The problem is down to how goodness should just flow from us and not need a moral code to order us. And definitely not one to reward or punish us! If we see the baby drowning, we should help and not be letting a moral perception kick in. Good should be spontaneous - not law driven.
The element of force exposes morality as a necessary evil.
To say morality is somehow the God of joy and love is to celebrate it.
Morality is not something to be celebrated as a manifestation of God if it is a necessary evil. You don't celebrate having to amputate somebody's diseased limb. Necessary evils are to be done but not revelled in.
Man has a toxic side - so man's morality is going to reflect some of that. For man to glorify the morality he creates by saying it is God, is the ultimate in vainglory. The humble man of God is a servant of pride. His humility is fake. Using God to glorify moral values and moral commands is celebrating necessary evil and it is an unnecessary evil to celebrate it. It violates any semblance of morality.Moralism is oppressive. The strict moralist hates liberals. The liberal moralist hates anybody strict. As morality has one hideous ingredient, force, it will always range from charming passive aggression to outright hate. If we all live long enough, our moralism will turn us into tyrants. The crave for power is never satisfied. It may look for a little extra power at a time or a lot but look it will.Force is one of the ingredients of morality. Anybody trying to reinforce or promote it with God is increasing the pressure.Moralists will tell you that people valuing kindness means little if they don't know how to be kind. So they think then that it is better to benefit the world by accident than to be kind and make a mess? Believers in God say that you must see that kindness is a gift from a loving God and bears his image. We have just been told then that even if atheists are moral they deserve little praise for it. It would be like praising an essay when all you have is the essay plan.Christianity says our heads are impaired due to original sin - so we cannot discern good from bad very well. If our own sinfulness demonstrates our incapacity to judge rightly, then that means we will often put forward bad as good. We will do that with God too. And we are told that we do!God being identified with morality makes new "necessary" evils.