Being Good Without God -- by William Bell

What does a believer think of when they describe their own beliefs about god?  The most obvious answers are God represents love, at least in the Judeo-Christian belief system.  Many believers think that without the loving benevolent father and the eternal hell fire alternative they would be eating babies, raping, and pillaging.

This is based on the assumption that God created humans basically in a state of immorality and without divine discouragement (threat of hell) humans would not sustain any form of culture and human society would fall apart.           

            

But this is in fact not true, and in my view if we are in a truly moral society then someone is being altruistic they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart not because they are afraid of punishment.  It could not even be considered altruism because it is meant to contribute to reaching a selfish cause (going to heaven not hell).

However this makes sense based on evolutionary predictions.  We are selfish animals and we have a deep instinct to survive, therefore once affected by a meme such as a religious belief, like the good-bad afterlife complex we will do whatever we can to make it so we survive that afterlife in good condition.

Sexuality and Religion Series - God, Atheism and Me -- by Sam P

I sit in silence, and think back to before. Before I became a free man. Free from the shackles of religion – having to cope with the stress and self bullying caused by anachronous religious dogma.

I found so much beauty and peace with my escape and its thanks to three things: Science, Reason and Prof. Richard Dawkins.

The reason I was trapped is still a bit unclear, a lot of it is based in fear. Fear of denying God Exists, Fear of the what if, fear of fire and brimstone, fear of disappointing my Christian parents. I would spend some nights in an appalling wretched mental wrestling match between following God and letting go.

A Religious Mother's Wishes -- By Kevin A

I've been an atheist for over four years and my mom has known about my atheism for around three. Up to this point it hasn't really caused a problem, mostly because we really don't talk about it, probably because it keeps the peace, which in general I'm fine with. Most of the time it just never gets brought up unless she tells me as a mere statement of fact that she went to church earlier in the day or something and it's relevant to the story as a whole.

I don't really have plans of getting married in the near future, but I have been dating my girlfriend, who is also an atheist, for over three years so it's not like the subject has never come up. With respect to marriage, you could probably infer from my previous posts that I would want a marriage ceremony completely devoid of any religious references, and given how it's seemed to be a non-issue with my mom over the past few years, I wasn't concerned that she would care either way if I had a religious wedding... that was until last week.

A Teachable Moment -- By Shannon B

Something slightly different today: this is a post from Shannon, who has recently started homeschooling her children, and has been thinking about secular morality and considering values for a life lived without God. 

Since coming out as an atheist, I’ve only had a few people ask (and not always directly) how I determine what is moral without a higher power guiding me.

Easily… and without the guilt.

I grew up in a somewhat religious family. Though, out of the three siblings, only one of us (Eldest Male, duh) was baptized as a baby…you know, for good luck with carrying on the family name. If my parents truly did  believe, then that’s like a big middle finger to the other two of us – still carrying around our original sin. Pffffft!

Searching for the Baby in the Bathwater -- By Libby Anne

Everyone who leaves the Quiverfull movement, Christian Patriarchy, or fundamentalism in general has a long journey in front of them. They have to sort through everything they have always believed and determine what to throw out and what to keep, what still makes sense and what does not. This can be a long and difficult process, and can even take years. Everyone’s journey is different. My personal journey led me out of Christianity altogether. This is the story of that journey. It is not your journey and does not need to be; rather, it is my journey.

I had been taught all my life to take the Bible literally, to believe that God created the world in six days, that Abraham and Moses really existed and did and said what the Bible records, that every word of the Gospels was true as written, and that Paul really did tell women to submit to their husbands and not work outside of the home. The Bible, I was taught, was infallible, without error of any sort, and was my guide for life. But when I found in college that my parents’ views on evolution were wrong, and that the Biblical account of creation could not possibly be literally true, I had a problem. What was I to believe?

A Personal Story -- By Zoe R

My family isn’t terribly religious. I grew up going to synagogue only once in a while, usually for special holidays. When I did go, I didn’t have much of an idea of what was going on; most of the proceedings were in Hebrew, which I never learned. I was taught the stories of the major holidays, such as the reason we celebrate Pesah or Yom Kippur, but they were just that. Stories. Not the absolute truth, but a story.

However, now that I’ve further explored my own belief system, I find myself growing more uncomfortable with the religion around me. I wasn’t indoctrinated, but it’s always there. My grandmother will say a prayer, or we’ll tell a religious story with all the oppressions of religion, and I’ll shift uncomfortably in my seat, biting my tongue.

I’ve tried my best not to let it become an issue. If someone mentions god, I bite my tongue or mumble in response. The message is clear, but not overly confrontational. If my aunt mentions that “God is unforgiving,” then I’ll just ignore the remark and move on. For the most part, this system works.

Are Proofs or Evidence for Deities Even Hypothetically Possible? -- By Mike K

Ever since de-converting, I've taken things like Occam's Razor and the burden of proof to heart, and enjoyed what was essentially a cleaning out of closets of all sorts of irrational bunk and superstition. There is an unshakable confidence that comes with reasonable doubt, a high standard of evidence and a willingness to accept evidence if it's merited. It rightly puts the burden of proof back on the shoulders of the claimants.

But I wonder if, at least for theists, it's an impossible burden - even if there were a god.

We all know the saying that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” but it's not really true, certainly not in all cases. At least with something like a personal god and creator, an intelligent designer with which you would see evidence everywhere. For something like that absence of evidence is definitely evidence of absence, just not explicit proof of any sort. With that in mind, I've occasionally asked, “What would be good evidence of the claims of god?” I honestly can never think of anything and generally give up pretty quickly. There is a central problem when it comes to a standard of evidence for an un-evidenced 'superbeing'.

Consider this video:

 

My friend showed this to me a few days ago and one of the first things to jump to mind was doing this where I could be seen by some tribal natives - the type that still throw spears at near-flying planes - and land where the impressionable lot would worship me as their sky deity! -Or perhaps not.

What I could do though was disprove my own divinity, and reveal to them there is no magic to flying, something anyone could achieve with the knowledge.

If I didn't demystify the science of human flight, you'd expect them to worship me, maybe even executing doubters for impiety in the presence of a deity. They'd do it because they couldn't imagine a natural explanation for me gliding across the sky. But if I explained it to them, a dangerous idea may occur: that if one thing presumed divine isn't, what does that mean for all the other things presumed divine? What of the sun, rain, lightning and life?

The first scientific discovery of this sort for any people ought to be the start of a philosophical revolution, at least it would if not for our incredible ability to compartmentalise our world view. But if it did, as it has for us, then to a sensible person something that looks magic would never be automatically presumed magic.

Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 

The thing is that we can conceive how the apparently magic can be natural. Flying is child’s play to our very knowledgeable minds. But we can conceive of a great deal more than just flying. We have a whole genre for these things called science fiction. It would be very impressive to see, but witnessing a being capable of harnessing the total energy output of a star doesn't for a moment seem godly to us. Some even expect humans to attain that kind of knowledge. The appearance of magic is simply no useful standard of evidence.

A bit closer to home, one of the many "proofs" that believers tote as work of the divine is alleged science in the bible. Now I don't think for a second that there is any real science is in the bible; to me it reads just as belligerently ignorant as the rancid sprawling of any bronze-age farmer would be. It takes real effort to interpret that nonsense into anything that resembles science but they manage - or more specifically manage to interpret to reflect recent discoveries, always after the fact. But even if I conceded that there was predictions of science in the bible, what would that prove?

There was a great deal of fascinating science done in antiquity. In the third century BCE, a Greek scientist named Eratosthenes managed not only to figure out that the planet was round but managed to work out the size of the planet. This discovery makes it interesting that the bible still depicts in Genesis a disk world with a dome sky afloat the deep. The bible was altered greatly over the centuries it was codified, particularly before it was canonised, and yet none of the ancient science found its way into the book. So there is a lot of science that could be in the bible, yet isn't, even though there was opportunity. But what if there was, and not just science from antiquity, but anachronistic science?

What about ancient astronauts? I mean, there's no real evidence for them but it'd be more likely than something divine, wouldn't it? Regardless of the probabilities, there is at least a non-supernatural explanation for something like that, which, due to the virtue of it being a natural explanation means Occam's Razor favours it for its fewer assumptions.

So what's left? What kinds of things do we require before we can treat the divine as a reasonable idea? Well if we were talking about a magic man, like Jesus, the very least we would demand to be shown is not simply something we cannot explain, that would be an argument from ignorance & credulity. I think back to watching Derren Brown on tv with my mum. She refused to believe he wasn't psychic, even after him explicitly saying he wasn't. Simply there is a great precedence of hucksters pretending to be magic, there's no shortage of them today even. Psychic mediums, faith healers, past-life regression hypnotists, take your pick.

A magic man could put on a good show, a fantastically inexplicable show, but that's simply not enough. Even in the best case for a miracle worker, none could ever be distinguishable from a talented huckster so the safer bet is always going to be the huckster.

What about personal revelation? Quite frankly, with the amount of knowledge we already have about the fallibility of the mind and experience, it's hard to understand why it's offered as some kind of evidence for the divine. It could simply come down to the sensing of a ghostly presence induced by carbon monoxide poisoning, sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations of alien abduction or oxygen starvation causing one of those near death experiences. Revelation and personal experiences just can't be any sort of evidence. I mean, just ask yourself this: "How can I distinguish between revelation and delusion?"

Does that therefore not mean that there isn't anything that could logically convince a skeptic of the supernatural without committing the argument from ignorance fallacy?

We can only ever know something if it's natural. Sure if there is something supernatural above nature and that occasionally interacts with nature, it would be detectable. But we could never learn anything about its mechanism existing outside nature. If we can't know how it works, we can't know its not natural. 

You just cannot parse unknown nature from the supernatural.

Clearly, even if there were a deity or deities out there somewhere, somehow, we could never expect reasonable evidence or proof for them. While the burden of proof is on the theists – its not one a theist could even hypothetically manage. It may feel disingenuous, but when we are asked by believers if there could be any proof we'd accept, the answer must be a simple, “No.”

It raises an interesting issue though. Theists often simultaneously claim that god is good or merciful or something and, “god's ways are mysterious.”

How can you assert anything about something that is entirely shrouded in mystery?

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Tomorrow: "Authority" By Harry Bratt