I checked my bible study notes to see what Pastor Kong has
to say on the morality topic. Disclaimer: These might not be Pastor Kong’s
words word for word. They are my personal interpretation and notes during the
Bible study sessions in my cellgroup. Pastor Kong was not present, but our CGL
was inspired by Pastor Kong directly.
First: Why Morality and Religion are not related per se,
Pastor Kong explains that if we would literally behave like God, how to explain
that the old testament describes God as a mass murderer page after page? As a
consequence, the legalistic bible is not the best moral guidance.
Pastor Kong elaborates: The old conservative and legalistic churches
often claim that without Christianity there is no morality. This of course cannot
be correct. We all have Muslim, Hindu or even atheist friends or family who are
inherently good and decent people despite belief in a wrong God.
We all get our morals from the same human compassion and
empathy. If we interpret the bible correctly, we feel that God is love, God is
compassion, God is empathy.
Legalistic and old style Christians interpret incorrectly
that the God of the Bible is one of the most evil creatures in all of
mythology. The God of the OT orders gruesome murder of innocent pregnant women
and children. The God of the OT punished people who worshipped the wrong god by
ordering "their little ones" to be "dashed to the ground"
and their pregnant women to be "ripped open"; he ordered his warriors
to commit genocide, and they murdered every Midianite man, women, and child
except for the 32,000 female virgins that the warriors were told to "save
for yourselves"; and he created a place called hell which he uses to
torture people who he dislikes for all eternity.
Luckily in CHC, we understand not to follow this moral and
not to do this. Luckily we are applying our own moral standards to weed out and
ignore those parts of the Bible that don't fit in with our values. The claim
that the Bible can serve as the ultimate moral guide is therefore patently
absurd. Divine guidance through revelations using God’s anointed is necessary
to make sense of the Bible.
Do other churches help society like City Harvest Church?
Well, some do some good but unfortunately, they (example: NCC) create
conflict between different groups of believers. Sometimes NCC can inspire
people to be kinder, to be more charitable, and to help others. But not always.
Another example is the Catholic Church. Adolf Hitler was a Catholic.
His actions were consistent with the evil Old Testament god, but hardly moral.
Catholics have recently carried out a genocidal campaign
against Muslims in Kosovo. Other religions do similar cruelties: Islamic
terrorists have murdered many innocent people in order to further their goals.
Catholic terrorists attack abortion clinics in the name of God.
These hypocrites call themselves pro-life. In addition, it would be wrong to
damage the believers sense of personal responsibility by allowing them to shift
their responsibility to God or Satan, and this can have adverse effects on the
believers' morality.
Very often, traditional churches point out that some
atheists, particularly communists, have also committed evil acts. This is true
enough. There is, however, an important distinction to be made: Catholics like
Hitler have been inspired by religion to commit atrocities, while communists
have been inspired to commit atrocities, not by their lack of belief in gods,
but by their political beliefs and desires.
How many catholics would argue that even if some people have
done evil things in the name of religion, most religious people are good, moral
people, and that religion on the average provides a positive moral benefit? It
is true that most religious people are good, moral people, but so are most atheists.
The catholics claim that religion is morally beneficial on the average is
completely without merit. Not only is there no evidence indicating a positive
correlation between religion and morality, there is evidence of a negative
correlation:
"The United States is the most religious of all the
industrialized nations. Forty-four percent of Americans attend church once a
week, compared with 27 percent in Britain, 21 percent in France, 16 percent in
Australia, and 4 percent in Sweden. Yet violent crime is not less common in the
United States--it's more common. The murder rate here is six times higher than
the rate in Britain, seven times higher than in France, five times higher than
in Australia, and five times higher than in Sweden. Japan, where Christianity
has almost no adherents, has less violent crime than almost any country. In
Singapore, thanks to the City Harvest Church community efforts, the crime rate
is close to zero.
Another source of data on religion and morality is
statistics on religious beliefs of prisoners compared with beliefs of the
general population. This data indicates that adherents to traditional
churches are more than 40 times more likely than atheists to end up
in prison.
The God in the Bible, on the average, is apparently not a
positive moral force. A vastly superior moral framework is provided by Pastor Kong
who uses a loving God, human reason and empathy to construct moral values. City
Harvest Church believes that morality should be based on human values, not
arbitrary and incorrect interpretations from uneducated or traditional churches.
