I’ve read with some interest the recent news stories about the hacking of a website whose purpose was to enable married people to have affairs. I’m interested in the moral questions it raises.
First, I wonder why people who sign up to a site that encourages deceit, are so surprised when they are in turn are dealt with deceitfully?
And secondly, I’m curious about people’s reactions. Some apparently fear being blackmailed because they don’t want their activities made public. But if having affairs is as common as implied by these revelations, why it is still thought to be shameful? However, it clearly is!
Here we see clearly the difference between knowing what is right, yet doing something felt to be wrong.
As a Christian I would like to think that people have some inherent sense of right and wrong, but I’m not sure whether this is actually the case. Just a few decades ago having sexual relationships outside marriage was commonly thought to be wrong (though of course it still happened), and it was seen as wrong for a couple to live together outside of marriage (though it did sometimes happen), and to have a child outside of wedlock had serious consequences. But in Western society nowadays these behaviours are all so commonplace that the Biblical view of sex belonging only within marriage is regarded as absurdly old fashioned and quaint, even among some Christians!
So, attitudes about morality can and do shift, sometimes quite quickly. [For example, redefining the question of gay marriage as an issue of ‘equality’ rather than an issue of ‘morality’, was a sleight of hand that changed public opinion remarkably quickly.]
So, where does morality come from? If it is just a matter of shifting public opinion, will there soon come a time where there will be no felt shame, no need for deceit and no risk of blackmail when one has an affair?
The Christian view is that morality is certainly not just a matter of public opinion - in fact it doesn’t come from people at all, but from God’s revelation; it is necessarily something defined beyond human beings. The most obvious example is the 10 Commandments in the Bible's Old Testament. These were not a moral code that Moses thought up, nor were they guidelines for good living offered by God to humankind in order to be helpful, but commandments about how people should live and the consequences laid down by God if they did not do so. (By the way, the 10th Commandment says “You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife”, Exodus 20 v17.)
But as most Western (supposedly ‘Christian’) societies have stopped believing in God, or at least in his authority, the resulting moral vacuum has been filled by 'public opinion’, which not only shifts but is different in different societies.
There is evident self-righteous hypocrisy when Western ‘morals’ are thought to be ‘right’ but another society’s ‘morals’ - for example that it is acceptable to marry girls at the age of 12 - are ‘obviously wrong’. Sorry, you cannot define your morality by public opinion and then condemn others who do what is considered normal amongst their public!
Either way, the Bible tells us clearly (e.g. Matt 10v26, Luke 12v2-3) that there will come a time when everything we have done - and even thought! - will be made public. Although my name will not be on that particular list which has just become public, I do not gloat. There are plenty of other things that I would be ashamed of when they become public, were it not that Jesus’ already knows about them, and died so that I could be forgiven.
However, it hadn’t occurred to me before that the fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy that 'all will be made known' might come about through computer hacking! I suppose this is just a tiny foretaste of the judgement still to come.
