Why be good?

[Esquilax]

Is it really so extreme as that?

Sure, we all have basic understandings of right and wrong (I say these are from God; some but not all atheists in this thread say they are from societal convention or agreement or evolution).

No, apparently you don't have that understanding; you've already asserted in this thread that what god wants determines what is moral, so if god inverted all previous moral laws tomorrow, you'd have to find things that are wrong to be right, and vice versa. You have no understanding at all of right and wrong; you've just got an understanding of what you think your god wants. I only hope you don't ever develop a mental illness that causes you to perceive voices that aren't there; you could easily hurt somebody, with beliefs like that.

However, there's no reason to believe that all Christians would become axe murderers if they "lost" their faith.

So... they might find some reason to be good that has nothing to do with the arbitrary fiat commands of a god?   What's the point of this thread then?

But conversely, I think the "Mad Max" analogy used much earlier might have some truth to it in the total absence of God.

Hey, or if your god arbitrarily decides to alter all the morals you follow. He could do that, after all. It's in his power.

Let me put it this way: you, as an atheist, benefit from the fact that you live in a society that is still largely influenced by Judeo-Christian morality. A look at ISIS will give you some indication of what your life would be like if Christianity were not still pulling us to the "right".

Bull. Our society abhors slavery, genocide... all the things that were at one time moral under your god's regime. The majority of the ten commandments figure nowhere in our laws; your religion has been in a desperate scrabble for centuries to demand fiat credit for all good things everywhere, but we see through that nonsense. If anything, we took the things that were good from your religion, and scrapped the bad, which is directly at odds with your claim that god's desires determine what is good.

And that's "if anything," because I don't for a second actually believe your religion has anything that is both meaningful and original in it; all the best moral precepts of christianity predate it by centuries.

Or would you look forward to living under Sharia law? And what would life be like if there were no authority at all?

My life already has no authority commanding it, and I manage to act morally regardless. That's because I'm able to think about my actions and their consequences. Your only response to that was "atheists can't do that," which means exactly jack shit.

Actually, that was just an example of the type of questions I might ask. But what you skipped over is the fact that I also asked myself similar questions for the first three claims.


1. Is Equislax even married? Is his wife out of town for the week? Are they separated or divorced? The questions may not ACTUALLY be asked...but our minds work such that in a flash, we know when something does or does not line up with all the other things we know to be true about you, your wife, and the circumstances which may or may not prevent or enable you to have lunch with her on any given day. "I had lunch with my wife." "Oh? I thought she had a new job across town...", etc, etc.

And by that token: "dragons don't exist." Oh, and also, just saying: "People cannot be resurrected from the dead."

You claim that it has been refuted.

You just fucking provided a series of additional, evidence based questions you would ask, beyond the two in your initial claim, in the quote above this one. If that's not a refutation, when you literally agree with the content of the counter-argument in your own post, I don't know what is.

That does not follow. The "truth value" is independent of whether many or few people believe it. However, over time, people generally find their way to the truth, so IF large numbers of people believe a thing, it might be true OR false, but either way, the numbers would at least suggest some investigation.

And if that investigation, as it has with christianity, shows no evidence at all of magic resurrections being possible? I mean, you still believe that claim anyway, despite the lack of evidence every investigation in the history of mankind has failed to find. One would think that would be a huge, huge factor in attributing belief to a claim, but you skip right by that when it comes to your pet religion.