a question to atheists?

Question

Please help me undersand your beliefs cause i'm confused.If there's no god or anyone else to judge us,if there is no life after death,would you castigate someone who raped a 10 year old girl,or killed another person,or robbed a beggar if he felt like doing it?if yes why so?to keep the world a safe place for our children?srew everything!we're all about to become dust after all!!

Answer 1

People are generally selfish. If everyone went about persuing their own selfish goals we'd have anarchy and most people wouldn't get what they want anyway. To avoid this we come up with a 'social contract'. We agree to give up certain rights, like the right to murder people, in order to give ourselves certain freedoms, like the freedom not to be murdered. And we give authority to the State to enforce this contract.
I'm an atheist, yet I treat others as I wish to be treated because doing so is in the best interests of society, and in my best interests as a member of that society.
Your question is on par with "If 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' is just a story, why don't we all go cry wolf?"

Answer 2

Yes, you are indeed confused. It's the majority of the Christians that claim "sin is sin", all holding the same weight in Gods eyes.

Most atheists have the ability to prioritize right and wrong. A candy bar thief is not the same as a child killer. Someone who cusses isn't the same as a rapist. So your tacit accusation that atheists have no reason to be morally grounded is baseless (your last sentence said it all).

It's many Christians that I'd question. They are the ones who are unable to decipher right and wrong without looking it up in a book. And even then, they can't tell the difference between a child killer and a car thief.

Now think it through before you get upset.

Answer 3

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. Just how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? . . . Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

In other word, he is saying that he realized that his notions of how things ought to be compared to the way things were made him realize that the notions where not his own, and that he was borrowing the ideas from the Christian world view. He needed these ideas to be given to him in order to understand what is right and wrong.

Answer 4

You confuse non belief in God with being an immoral crazy. Ones personal belief has nothing to do with if they are human or not. If your dog doesn't accept Christ as his savior is he attacking and killing everything that moves, is he humping everything upright? Belief is a matter of faith, no proof but that leap from possible to your own conviction. That doesn't mean that everyone must cross that road. Don't we judge one another? Is it only your belief that gives you common decency, politeness, courtesy, table manors, or the ability to follow the rules of the road? Non belief in God does not make you lawless, you simply follow the laws of man instead of God.

Answer 5

Morality has nothing to do with whether a god exists or not.

Morality is the set of what we consider right and wrong. The purpose of morality is to allow people to live among each other relatively peaceably. That crosses religious lines.

Religion actually makes people morally lazy. Their spoon-fed worldview relieves them from having to think about what really makes something right or wrong. It's hard to get some to even describe why killing is wrong without resorting to "God said so".

My morality is generally based on the idea that humans have value and we must value our fellow man in order to live in peace. It basically follows along the lines promoted by Humanism. From this point of view, it is easy to see why I would consider raping a 10 year old girl or robbing a beggar to be a bad thing. Unlike many Christians I know, I could actually expound on this and explain in detail why I think each of those are wrong and what I think we, as a society, should do to punish those offenders and prevent them in the first place. I don't need to resort to threats of divine punishment to do so, either.

Answer 6

Yes. Morality arises not from a belief in god but from empathy.

I would not want you to stab me. So I won't stab you. Simple. If you attempt to stab me, I am fully within my moral right to stab you in self defense.

Now tell me, if there was no god, would you go raping ten year olds, killing people, or robbing beggars? If so, then please remain whatever religion you are, your collar suits you and keeps you in line. May your god keep you on a tight leash.

I for one don't need a god to be a good and moral person. The god of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims is a monster greater than even Satan in that same mythology. I consider it a good thing he does not exist.

Answer 7

In as much as I was not around to see how everything came into being (and neither were you),I say, "I don't know ..... YET!" To assume that some god, my less than intellectual ancestors made up, instantaneously farted the universe into being, is absurd. Atheists have ethics which regulate how people treat each other in the "Social Contract'. You religionists have to have some god creature to smack you up-side the head to enforce social morals, ethics are superior.

Answer 8

Whenever I see a question like this, I am appalled to be reminded that there are people out there who are so out of touch with their basic humanity, and reality, that they would not have any idea how to conduct themselves in society, absent the code of an imaginary supernatural being, based on the myths, superstitions, fairy tales and fantastical delusions of an ignorant bunch of Bronze Age fishermen and wandering goat herders.

Cooperation, altruism and love are innate properties of human existence... a more sophisticated version of the social organization that you can see among pods of dolphins or orcas, packs of wolves, lion prides and troops of chimpanzees. Moral consensus, moral conscience and mutual empathy are evolved survival traits. These are social constructs... the social lubrication that allows people to exist together. People come away with the misconception that they don't exist, absent religion. The religious puppet masters try to perpetuate that idea, in order to protect their conduits to wealth and power... but that is a canard. This has to do, entirely, with human nature.

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"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." ~ Steven Weinberg
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Statistics like the following are puzzling, until somebody like you shows up... then it all makes perfect sense. Christians make up about 75% of the US population and 75% of the US prison population. No big surprise there.

Atheists, on the other hand, make up about 10% of the US population... but they make up only 0.2% of the US prison population. Now, isn't THAT a surprise? That means that atheists are FIFTY (50) times LESS LIKELY to be incarcerated than Christians. Pretty strange, huh, for a group that has no god-given guiding moral principals?

I can think of only two possibilities that might reasonably be said to account for this discrepancy:

1. Atheists are of a higher ethical and moral caliber than Christians, and thus are less prone to do the same kinds of nasty things that land so many Christians in the slammer;

OR,

2. Atheists are, overall, a lot smarter than Christians and thus, they are less likely to get caught in the course of their transgressions.

It's GOT to be one or the other... take your pick.

Answer 9

I am really getting tired of explaining this...
Being punished for a crime is so much more potent if this is your only life. God and morality are not synonymous. Are you suggesting that the ancient Greeks didn't have laws against murder or rape? Of course not. So Atheists, just like you, have morals, and ours are based on our own consciences and ethics.
Not someone else's.

Answer 10

How on earth are we supposed to live happily in the short life we do have without law and order?

The concept of ethics and morality have existed before and outside religion, and they are for maintaining order and happiness in society. Of course we want a stable and moral world, on another note, if god forgives everything we do if we just say we believe in him, what keeps you from raping, pillaging, etc.?