Once you see yourself as having a religious mind, there’s no crawling back out of that rabbit hole. A religious view isn’t the same as joining a cult where some bearded leader hoards Kool-Aid and controls your mind. No, the religious mind is about recognizing that life’s stakes are sky-high—you either spiritually flourish or rot. Your actions matter. You’re not just competing in some zero-sum, Darwinian cage match, battling your fellow humans for scraps of survival. No, you’re building something deeper: a soul. And, lucky you, you’re accountable for that construction.
I’ve fantasized plenty of times about being free from this religious wiring. In my fantasy, I’m a “free thinker,” sipping espresso while smugly dismissing religion as man-made fluff—imperfect, tribalistic, derivative, and, let’s not forget, violent. Religion in this dream isn’t the root of morality; it’s an obstacle to reality. Enter Elizabeth Anderson, the philosophy professor who drops a truth bomb in her essay, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” Anderson argues that morality doesn’t come from God but from people learning how to cooperate. Morality, she says, is baked into our DNA, so religion is at best redundant and, more often than not, a corrupting force.
I’ve seen Anderson’s point play out with some of my most moral students, both professed atheists. One was a Hungarian transfer student who swore her father, also an atheist, had stronger morals than any theist she knew—and I believed her. She was one of the hardest-working, most decent students I’d ever taught. Then there was my Vietnamese student, the lone atheist among her five Christian siblings, who let it slip that when their mother was dying of cancer, she was the only one who flew back to Vietnam to care for her. Her devout Christian brothers and sisters? Nowhere to be found. Her hatred for religion as hypocrisy was as strong as her love for her mother.
Students like these could easily be poster children for Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to have morality. In fact, she’d argue, it might be better if we ditched religion altogether. Anderson kicks off her essay with a field trip to the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where creationists divide the world into two paths: “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” Creationism, naturally, is the road to moral purity, while Evolutionism is the fast track to fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism, and every other horror under the sun.
Anderson doesn’t hold back: she writes that creationists’ beef with evolution isn’t scientific—it’s moral. Evolution leads to immorality, they argue, because it denies the existence of God. And, as theists have been shouting for centuries, without God, morality’s got nothing to stand on. As Dostoyevsky famously didn’t say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork keeping the sinful champagne from exploding all over the place.
But Anderson asks the obvious question: Can we know right from wrong without God? Do we really need the Ten Commandments to figure out that murdering your neighbor for his fancy new donkey might be a bad look? Of course not, she says. Every society—whether it’s religious, atheist, or somewhere in between—figures out basic moral rules: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These rules existed long before monotheism waltzed onto the scene, suggesting that moral knowledge comes not from divine revelation but from the messy experience of living together and figuring out how not to kill each other.
Anderson’s takedown of theistic morality doesn’t stop there. She argues that the belief in God doesn’t just supply unnecessary rules; it’s often a crutch, relying on the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to goad people into behaving decently. Her rebuttal is simple: people are motivated by love, honor, and respect, not divine bribery. In her view, these attributes can flourish just fine without a belief in God.
Next, she dismantles the idea that we need God to give moral rules authority. If you need a deity to tell you murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, Anderson suggests, you’ve got bigger problems. We know these things are wrong without divine intervention—and, if your reasoning leads you to think everything is permitted, that’s a pretty solid clue you’ve gone off the rails.
But here’s where Anderson flips the script. She argues that the moralistic “everything is permitted” problem applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism. If God’s laws are based on authority and not inherent goodness, then “in principle, anything is permitted.” Take Calvinism, for example. Predestination’s divine lottery, where God saves a few lucky souls and damns the rest to eternal hellfire, isn’t based on any moral reasoning—it’s just God’s will, and you better deal with it.
Anderson’s critique of fundamentalist religion is merciless. She argues that if you take the evidence for theism seriously, you end up committed to the idea that even the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know these acts aren’t morally permitted, she says, we should doubt the evidence for theism.
By “theism,” Anderson isn’t just talking about some vague belief in a higher power. She’s talking about the God of Scripture—Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran. And if you take the Bible as inerrant, Anderson argues, you’re forced to reckon with a God who’s often cruel and unjust, punishing people for the sins of others, hardening hearts, ordering genocides, and permitting slavery and rape.
Of course, Christian apologists love to claim that the Old Testament God is the angry one, and the New Testament God is all love and forgiveness. Anderson’s having none of it. She points out that Jesus’ so-called “family values” include hating your relatives if they get in the way of your loyalty to him. And then there’s the doctrine of eternal damnation—a New Testament specialty—which, in Anderson’s view, is both cruel and incoherent.
In the end, Anderson concludes that the God of the Bible is a moral disaster. But she’s sympathetic to thoughtful believers, the ones who struggle with the Bible’s moral atrocities. Their options, she says, are pretty grim. You can “bite the bullet” and accept the Bible’s horrors, bitter seeds and all, like a true believer. Or you can try a stopgap measure, arguing that God’s commands were appropriate in biblical times but don’t apply now—a strategy that doesn’t really hold water if you believe in a timeless God.
Anderson’s conclusion is blunt: we’re better off abandoning theological claims as a foundation for morality. She draws on Hobbes to argue that worshiping God out of fear of his raw power isn’t love—it’s survival instinct, and that’s no basis for morality. Instead, Anderson suggests, morality is a system of reciprocal claim-making, where we hold each other accountable, no gods required.
As compelling as Anderson’s essay is, I’m still not convinced. The world isn’t some rational, orderly place. There are shadows, mysteries, omens, and prophecies—strange phenomena that transcend the cold logic of reciprocal claim-making. Religion, in all its messiness, is the story of a fallen people trying to reconnect with their Maker. And as much truth as I see in Anderson’s rejection of theistic morality, I can’t shake the religious mind. I see myself as someone who’s fallen and in need of a path, a true path, to becoming the person I’m meant to be. Anderson’s talk of reciprocal claim-making? It doesn’t even come close to satisfying that deeper, spiritual hunger.
Cinemorphosis 
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