Divine Command Theory Quotes

Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.

For such is my will.

The Bible nowhere prohibits war. In the Old Testament we find war and even conquest positively commanded, and although war was raging in the time of Christ and His apostles, still they said not a word of its unlawfulness and immorality.

Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offense of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the great creator; and which therefore no man can be entitled to deprive himself or another of, but in some manner either expressly commanded in, or evidently deducible from, those laws which the creator has given us; the divine laws, I mean, of either nature or revelation.

Capital Punishment is a non-diminishable command of God. No pope has the authority to go against God's stated will.

Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.

God's law is God's law, period. Teach your children that.

Thinking that morality is all about commandments is a relatively new way of thinking, since the Reformation.

The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them.

The notion that there is no basic value system is far more incoherent or invalid than the notion that there are essential values. Every religion can tell you it has basic values. You ask a Christian, most Christians would say love God and love your neighbor. Is that the entirety of Christianity? No one in his right mind would say it is.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

What is considered sinful in one of the great religions to which citizens belong isn't necessarily sinful in the others. Criminal law therefore cannot be based on the notion of sin …

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful; it is rebellion against God's will.

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

It's the Law of God that gave the stability to Christian civilization.

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).

Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

Republican politicians often evoke the Bible when it suits their purposes. But they disregard some of its most important teachings when formulating policy. This includes the story of Noah's Ark.

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.