(June 15, 2015 at 7:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: This is kind of a spinoff of the WHY BE GOOD thread.![]()
The question I have for atheists, isn't "why by good." I think it's simplistic and deeply flawed to think that the only reason to "be good" is to avoid Hell. And of course, I believe that anyone can be a good person regardless of beliefs.
The question I have for atheists is how do we know what IS good?
Religious or not, we all somehow know that certain things are intrinsically, universally immoral. Let's use murder as an obvious example. So if murder is wrong, where did this law come from? If this is a universal truth, where did this truth come from and who/what determined it to be what it is?
This is the sort of question that used to bother me a lot when I was a Christian.
There are logical reasons why murder is considered immoral. Instability would not be good for a social species and killing each other would definitely hurt our ability to live with one another. It makes sense that our society has evolved to the point that we disapprove of murdering innocent people.
Our view on murder has changed from biblical times. For example, we no longer put people to death for cursing their parents, having an affair or being raped while in the city. Those would be considered innocent people today. They weren't considered innocent in the Old Testament world. Our views change on these issues.
There are no easy answers. Once I became an atheist I had to rethink about what I considered moral. I couldn't just accept what the bible said was good anymore. I had to ask myself why certain actions were bad or good. In the long run, I feel that this has made me a better person but when I first lost faith this questioning really frightened me.