Personally I think that being moral out of a fear of punishment or desire for reward is counter to the notion of free will.
We are all like Adam. We all commit the original sin. We sense God but do not wish to fellowship with him. Instead we wish to increase our knowledge of right and wrong, mostly wrong.
On a side note, an interesting observation from an article I read last night:
custance.org
In the first place, revelation is essential for religion but for philosophy it must be rejected, human reason being the only justifiable tool. Religion is concerned with morals, philosophy with ethics: the difference between the two is essentially this: morals have to do with man's relationship to God and ethics with man's relationship to man. Morals are absolute, ethics are relative. If we may substitute meta-nature for meta-physics, we may say that the subject matter of philosophy is meta-nature (whereas the subject matter of science is Nature), but the subject matter of religion is super-nature. In religion, miracle is, in a sense, an essential adjunct, but in philosophy miracle is simply of no concern. The end object of all religion is to find God, but the end of philosophy is to find the truth. This does not mean that religion does not have the discovery of truth as an object, but only that it is a secondary one. |
