As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.
The threat of hell never was very efficient. Looking at the last 2,000 one can see that the encouragement of a heaven if one were good and the threat of hell if one was bad didn't keep people from being bad or evil. But, in today's increased consciousness, the "hell threat" is pretty much lost whatever power it might have had: even confession(s) is a waning principle among Catholics.
Whether you believe that we're entering an era of greatly increased consciousness (can you say 2012?) or not, there's a sense that a planetary community of "let's be good" is under construction. It's what many are now calling "evolutionary ethics".
So, why do some people follow ethical mores and others don't? Amit Goswami has this answer, "The reason so many of us, even today, try to be good in our daily living, with so much unethical behavior in our societies, is evolution. There is an evolutionary pressure that we experience s a calling, and we respond."
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham embraced and expanded on the "utilitarian concept" of humanity in the mid 1800's. Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all people. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome.
But, there's a big difference between pleasure and happiness which neither men expounded.
Pleasure eventually separates. Happiness is always the result of wholeness. To fall back on two Greek words and concepts, pleasure would be more akin to eros (lust) and happiness to agape (unconditional love). Pleasure of course can entail minor things such as Connie's Custard or sexual perversion that's become habitual. Events and ideas have consequences and the more we can limit the more serious "pleasurable things", the better our lives will ultimately be.
We are in the midst of a major increase, advancement in evolutionary ethics. It may not loo it, but the feel is building. Christians and Muslims will one day walk hand in hand without feeling a need to convert the other to "their way" since there's really only ONE WAY. Join the EVOLUTION which some are calling Lovevolution (http://www.lovevolution.net).
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