An atheist or agnostic who acts morally simply because it is the right thing to do is, in a sense, more moral than someone who is trying to avoid everlasting torment or, as is the case with martyrs, to achieve eternal bliss. He or she is making the moral choice without benefit of Pascal's divine bribe [wherein religious belief is more of a game than faith]. This choice is all the more impressive when an atheist or agnostic sacrifices his or her life, for example, to rescue a drowning child, aware that there'll be no heavenly reward for this lifesaving valor. The contrast with acts motivated by calculated expected value or uncalculated unexpected fear (or, worse, fearlessness) is stark.

Still, people do often vigorously insist that religious beliefs are necessary to ensure moral behavior. Though the claim is quite clearly false of people in general, there is a sense in which it might be true if one has been brought up in a very religious environment. A classic experiment on the so-called overjustification effect by the psychologists David Greene, Betty Sternberg, and Mark Lepper is relevant. They exposed fourth- and fifth-grade students to a variety of intriguing mathematical games and measured the time the children played them. They found that the children seemed to possess a good deal of intrinsic interest in the games. The games were fun. After a few days, however, the psychologists began to reward the children for playing; those playing them more had a better chance of winning the prizes offered. The prizes did increase the time the children played the games, but when the prizes were stopped, the children lost almost all interest in the games and rarely played them. The extrinsic rewards had undercut the children's intrinsic interest. Likewise, religious injunctions and rewards promised to children for being good might, if repudiated later in life, drastically reduce the time people spend playing the "being good" game. This is another reason not to base ethics on religious teachings.

In conclusion, emotional arguments from fear, hope, and fervency are very easy to refute but especially difficult to successfully oppose since, despite their occasional mathematical garb, their appeal circumvents, subverts, bypasses, and undermines the critical faculties of many. Moreover, since literal truth is not always the paramount concern of people, it seems that the untruths underlying faith may make ordinary life more bearable.