(May 27, 2015 at 4:22 pm)Brian37 Wrote:(May 26, 2015 at 7:29 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: If there is no God, then there is no hell; and if there is no hell, then there are no ultimate, eternal repercussions, good or bad, for how we live out our mortal lives. Of course, atheists insist that people should be "good without God."
But why? If God does not exist, why be good?
Why does my cat preen my dog's fur? Why do army ants work together to build nests? Because life evolved to cooperate. Now while evolution in reality does not care if cruelty or compassion, cooperation or force win, our species like other mammals also evolved with empathy.
Why do I behave? Because I have empathy and everyone is capable of that and you don't need an antiquated book or an invisible sky hero to know what empathy is.
If you cannot figure out on your own without a cosmic security guard threatening you to behave I feel sorry for you. You also don't need to believe in Santa as an adult to be good.
The problem with religious morality is that the empathy gets limited to the tribe and is not universal and only designed to get attention for the head figure. Better morality is doing the right thing even without being told what to do.
I like how you're a bit dick'ish to theists in literally the same sentence about how you behave because you're so empathetic.
If I were guessing why people behave, it's because that's what we were taught, and we don't put too much more thought into it because we don't really need to.
