Love for humanity,or fear for eventual punishment?

[Henriksson]

Read and weep. (http://www.carm.org/atheism/atheistandethics.htm)

This article says that the only reason for someone to be moral is that "God" will punish them somehow. It says that atheists only reason for doing moral things are, and I quote:At the risk of labeling the atheist as self-centered, it does not serve the best interests of an atheist to murder and steal since it would not take long before he was imprisoned and/or killed for his actions. Basically, society will only put up with so much if it is to function smoothly. So, if an atheist wants to get along and have a nice life, murdering and stealing won't accomplish it. It makes sense for him to be honest, work hard, pay his bills, and get along with others. Basically, he has to adopt a set of ethics common to society in order to do that. Belief in God is not a requirement for ethical behavior or an enjoyable life.
This couldn't be further from the truth. As someone with genuine love and respect for all of humanity, I am interested in doing what serves all of humanity best. What the quote above says is that I only do what is in my best self-interest. That is far from true. I don't care what this "bible" says, I'm an independant freethinker that can think for myself and not be dictated what to do. The bible is used to "keep everyone in line" (I'm not claiming this is what it's purpose was meant for, BTW. It just kinda happened so to speak.), but I am not going to just accept it as "absolute morality".

In conclusion, I urge everyone to think for themselves and not do everything in fear of "the allmighty punisher". Remember, every time we think about realism the world becomes a bit smarter. I'd like to make thinking cool again.

What do you choose?

[inamerica55585]

Are you saying that Belief in God is or isn't a requirement for ethical behavior?
I don't believe in an almighty punisher.
In fact, I have the opinion that "God" is the random probabilities that are calculated for every single nanosecond of our lives.
If you do think in teh sense of an almighty punisher, then God is the astronomical probabilty dictated every second about whether the world ends. this probability is roughly 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999 to 1 against. or is that vice versa?

[Henriksson]

....I don't get it. <img src='/images/emoticons/smiley5.png'>

[Tatterdemalion]

See, the problem is that all of this michigoss and hullabaloo stems from the very ill-informed misconception that somehow (1) Religions universally dictate a system of moral behavior rooted in reward and punishment and that (2) ethics and morality were introduced to the world as religious concepts. Both of these couldn't be further from the truth.

People need to stop associating "religion" with "Christianity", because there are plenty of religions that do not prescribe a belief in eternal divine punishment (most of them, actually). What this little essay ignores is the fact that many religions do not hold the belief that morals are dictated to humans by God, and that the only way people can behave morally is by obeying divine will, which they do out of fear of punishment. This is a disgustingly materialistic way to look at religion, and probably one of the reasons so many people hold such a negative view of religion. It seems that somehow the idea that people do good things because these things make them a healthy person and make the world a metter place is alien to the author (regardless of the fact that there are actually religions that hold these sorts of beliefs). In short, the author is one of an obscenely large group of people, who is a cynic, and believes that all people act out of self interest, yet has somehow deluded himself into believing that this belief is a doctrine of Christianity. It's pretty disgusting, really.

Also, one needs to keep in mind that the idea of ethics is in no way a Christian idea. Ethics, and morality, and all of these other ideas come from the Greeks, some thousand or so years before the creation of Christianity. While I may need to brush up a bit on my Western philosophy, these are indeed grand philosophical concepts that people were writing about and teaching and discussing long before any sort of Christianity ever poked its head up, a fact that the writer seems to have decided to conveniently ingore.

My advice is to not read nonsense like the example you provided because it just makes everyone look bad, and gives people the wrong idea about everything. Religion on the whole is not about an "almighty punisher" (except maybe a few Christian groups), so there's no reason that thinking for oneself and following a religion should need to come in conflict with one another in this area (on the other hand, if you want to get into a discussion about dogma, we can save that for another time).

[Henriksson]

That's one great post! I'd just like to aks you; do you think absolute morality is true?

[Tatterdemalion]

"Absolute morality" is borth redundand and an oxymoron (of that's even possible). Morals are dictated by a society, and are a society's way of telling people what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, within different cultures there are going to be different moral codes, there's no question about it. The concept of good and bad do not exist in the naural world, but are simply a construct of human society, so we need to realize that morals and ethics are also concepts that society created. So to suggest that any sort of morality can be "absolute" would be misguided, yet at the same time, to suggest that morals are not meant to be treated as though they are absolute is silly.