My “Moral Code” revolves essentially around the development of emotional skill and self knowledge. If someone were to plug some sort of brain controller in to you, and force you to do “the right thing” all day long, would that make you a better person? Is being forced by social coercion and the threat of ostracism really that different?
I don’t even think one needs to posit that humans are “innately” good. What I would posit is that a free individual or social system in motion will find their points of equilibrium and balance in ways of being which are “good” as I define them. Chaos rarely is. Orders are simply hidden, and they are particularly hidden when free motion is encumbered or even prevented.
And the converse applies: confinement and restriction breed meanness and feed what is always potentially bad in human behavior.
Whatever the message Jesus taught, I think it was perverted by the emerging Church to help ensure the financial and political power of the elites.
What makes sense to me is that he taught that God is not a fucking imbecile, and of course you get multiple second chances. And I think notions of eternal Hell were entirely absent, even if relative hells were present. In point of fact, I believe those exist.
But think this through. Animal sacrifices were commanded by the Torah, and were to be done at the Temple of Jerusalem. That Temple was destroyed. This would have represented an existential thread to Judaism outright.
Christianity found almost all its early adherents in Jews, and they seem by and large to have preserved at least for a 100 years or so many Jewish practices.
Animal sacrifice is for the expiation of sin. Sins, after the destruction of the Temple, could not be atoned. So why not, one can see someone reasoning, make of Jesus the FINAL sacrifice?
But if there is only one sacrifice, there can only be one expiation, and that logically implies that a choice has to be made with permanent consequences, which in turn implies that you go one way or the other, your sins are expiated or they are not. If not, you don’t get another chance, which means that if you don’t go to Heaven, then you go to Hell, and if you go to Hell, and you don’t get another chance, then that sentence is eternal.
This is logical, even if wrong and even stupid to the point of being abusive. Certainly it could not have been better calculated to allow the inculcation of fear which could be harnessed to the cultivation of quite worldly ambitions.