(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?
I think you'll find many things that help/have helped us survive as a species over the last 200,000 years correlate very well with what we deem to be socially and morally acceptable.
1. Don't kill people for fun (bad for species)
2. War is sometimes justified (protection of the "clan" for survival)
3. Don't screw your siblings (bad for the gene pool)
Etc, etc
Certainly not the ONLY answer, but our evolution has a lot to do with our morals.