Many people, religious and non-religious, try very hard to behave morally, to be good. Why should they do so?
A traditional religious answer to this question has been that if we follow the guidance, the moral code, provided by the scriptures and institutions of religion, we will go to heaven and if we break the rules we will go to hell. Stated simplistically like this, the implied motivation for moral behaviour is a selfish one: we should be kind to other people not because it is right to be kind but because we will be punished if we aren’t. This is the kind of motivation sometimes used with children: “play nicely and you can have an ice cream later”. It can be associated with an anthropomorphic idea of a God with a clipboard standing in judgment of us when we die, weighing our good and bad deeds against each other, and the idea that we can get away with acting immorally if we do something good to balance it later. To be fair, this is not really what motivates a lot of religious people to treat others as they would like to be treated themselves. We can find better reasons for moral behaviour.
Rather than think in terms of heaven and hell, the Bahá’í Faith teaches the idea of one spiritual world that we progress to when we leave this physical one. As we grow in our mother’s womb, we develop the physical means for survival in this world: our physical bodies, comprising arms, arms, legs, a brain, a heart etc. Similarly, our purpose in this life is to develop the spiritual qualities that we will need in the next world: love, kindness, honesty, courage, trustworthiness etc. When we enter the next world, there is no man with a clipboard judging us; we simply have to live with the reality of what sort of person we have become. We cannot imagine what this next world is like - it is not a physical one like this world and old physical images of heaven and hell certainly don’t apply – and so, rather than speculating on the nature of a world we cannot imagine, we should simply concentrate on developing our spiritual qualities in this world, on becoming more moral in our behaviour.
So far, this still implies a selfish motivation: that we should develop our spiritual qualities not because it is right to do so but because if we don’t, although we may not go to hell but we will arrive in the next world disabled. But this misses a crucial, and perhaps most important, aspect of the change in ourselves that we are trying to achieve. Developing spiritually does not just mean changing our behaviour; it involves changing our motivation as well. It is a journey and, whatever our motivation for starting the journey, that motivation should change along the way. We should become kind, tolerant and truthful, for example, not because we expect some later reward and not even because we know that that is how we should behave, but because we are no longer capable of being otherwise. We should be developing these spiritual qualities because we love them. The theist could describe these spiritual qualities as attributes of God, and would talk of loving God and hence acting for the love of God. If we make it this far along the journey, we are no longer developing our spiritual capacities for our own sake, but in order to better serve God and our fellow humans. And the journey continues.
O Son of Man! If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself; and if thou seekest My pleasure, regard not thine own; that thou mayest die in Me and I may eternally live in thee. (Baha'u'llah, The Hidden Words)
But, this does not explain why people who do not believe in God or life after death should act morally, as a great many obviously do. Nor does it give a complete explanation of why someone should start on the religious journey described above.
There is something innate in the nature of man that can be described in many different ways. A theist might describe it as man having a spiritual nature, as something of God in everyone:
“Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting”. (Baha'u'llah, The Hidden Words)
However we describe this, and whether we are religious or not, it is something real that is there in the nature of every human: the light within, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of compassion, of empathy in feeling the joy and pain of others, a sense of the oneness of humanity. These qualities can be nurtured by our life experience and education, and by our own thoughts and decisions, or they can be suppressed. Religions can provide ways of thinking about these qualities in humanity: the purpose of reading scripture, prayer, meditation and fasting should be to help develop them. But all people, religious or not, can find qualities such as love, kindness, honesty, courage and trustworthiness within themselves and value them.
Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 259)
What is the evidence that we have these qualities, whether we have a religious faith or not? We live in a world that encourages selfishness and competition, through institutions that are unremittingly adversarial in their operation and through constant advertising that tells us that the route to happiness lies in material acquisition and making our neighbours jealous! Inevitably, many do succumb to the selfish and animalistic view of the nature of mankind that this thrusts upon them. But many people do not: they protest against the injustice experienced by people they do not know personally and exhibit enormous self-sacrifice to help others. They would not do this unless there was something internal telling them that they should.
However we describe them, these positive qualities, these gems of inestimable value, are there in every child. Imagine a world in which these qualities are nurtured and encouraged in every child as they grow to adulthood.