35 responses so far ↓

• 1 minxlj // Jan 30, 2009 at 11:34 am

  “How can atheists be good without God?” – I’ve heard that so many times and it really annoys me, as if I’m incapable of being a good person without believing that something else is responsible for me being good?

  1. We all have the capacity to understand right and wrong, love and hate, happiness and heartache – so inherently we all KNOW what is right.

  2. I have empathy for my fellow human beings, and animals, so I don’t need someone else, or any other entity, to need to instruct me how to use this empathy – it’s already there.

  3. I, and only I, am responsible for my own actions. Too often ‘God’ is used as an excuse by those people who don’t want to take ultimate responsibility for what they do. It’s a far more sobering thought, to me, that it’s only ME who governs my actions. Nobody else to blame if I fuck it up.

  4. Personally, I think having some ‘fallback’ option in saying that ‘God’ governs what you do, and *especially* saying that ‘he’ forgives everything (!) is not a flawless plan for getting people to be moral. There’s usually an excuse ready and waiting as to why you ’sinned’.

  5. My motivation for being a moral and good person is because I want to be, I LIKE being a good person, and I like other people being good. Life isn’t always easy, but being a good person is the best way through it! Being a bad person doesn’t help me, it doesn’t help others, and it doesn’t help the world in general – it’s what they call a ‘no-brainer’

  6. If me being an Atheist is considered being a bad person – well clearly this supposed all-forgiving ‘God’ doesn’t like hardworking, kind, empathetic, friendly human beings who volunteer for charity in their spare time, recycle and protect the planet, love and care for animals, and try to pass on kindness to others as much as possible. Huh. How about that?

• 2 xJane // Jan 30, 2009 at 12:02 pm

  I don’t think I have to tell everyone that I’m an Aristotelean (who believed that people are only truly happy when they do good—that our own internal moral compass is as good as any deity’s commandments). But glancing at your list of moral roots made me pause. I think one of my fundamental moral roots is that all things are divine (I often make exceptions for the created—I can only rarely find divinity in an internal combustion engine). So that it is not simply humans who are worthy of respect and protection but animals, trees, and oceans. I think our unique capacity for action and contemplation gives us a certain responsibility or, as you said, duty to protect those weaker than ourselves (be they people, animals, or “things”) and to speak for those who have no voice.

  I don’t feel that I have a great deal of empathy—I am often at a loss as to how to act toward people who have suffered a loss. But at the end of the day, I believe that love (including friendship), trust, and beauty will solve most ills.

• 3 Rich // Jan 30, 2009 at 12:03 pm

  John, great list.

  Interestingly enough, for those paying attention, Christianity really distills down to two core concepts:

  1. Love God
  2. Love your neighbor as yourself.

  Matt. 25’s overview of judgement day is merely a follow-up on that; how well did we do?

  Unfortunately, few seem to be able to stick with that core program, and get sidetracked on all other kinds of weird (and sometimes hurtful) crap.

  Along with the items you listed, I like to think that Christian core also comprises my moral grounding, but I would never call myself “hard core”

• 4 jana // Jan 30, 2009 at 12:05 pm

  I guess my question is more along the lines of, how is it that believers can be ‘good’ when they spend their time preoccupied with placating a distant and arbitrary deity as a means of guaranteeing their own salvation?

• 5 Lessie // Jan 30, 2009 at 12:35 pm

  I’d like to consider myself a good person, but my morality is certainly more self-serving than it was when I believed in God.
  The guidelines I use are: am I causing other people pain? I’ve caused a lot of people a lot of pain recently, and the only way I justify it is the fact that I was losing myself in a very real way. In general, I certainly try to make sure my decisions don’t hurt others.

  Is this true to what I want/need? I only have this life. Am I doing my best to maximize what I get out of it?

  Are my decisions sustainable? Even though I won’t care much after I die about the condition of the planet, I do care about the world my children will raise their hypothetical children in, and I want it to be a good place for them.

  Am I expecting too much from others? I try very hard not to take the people in my life for granted. Life is so transitory. Any one of my friends or loved ones could be gone in a moment, and so I try to love them for who they are and encourage them in their own path. I have no business asking them to be someone they’re not.

  And along with that, do I really have any idea what’s going on in someone else’s life? No. Not usually. So I try very hard to be compassionate toward others’ decisions.

• 6 Craig // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:15 pm

  I think that I’m basically good for the exact same reason as everyone else – it’s programmed into me as an evolutionary trait.

  I don’t believe that religionists are actually good and moral because of their belief in a god/gods, but perhaps in spite or regardless of it.

  I think a very similar version of human morality has been shown to exist in every culture and society so much so that it probably has the same source. As religions vastly differ and there are many now who are totally areligious and atheistic, (and who even grow up that way), I don’t see it as logical to argue that morality comes from religion, or even more narrowly, from the Islam0-Judaeo-Christian god.

  We, as humans, have a conscience and morals because it helps us survive as a species and a community.

• 7 G // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:20 pm

  personally, I wonder if humans are just wired in different ways; some with more of a proclivity towards caring mindfulness of the individuals around them (aka “good” people) and some with less (the ‘bad guys’).
  I see it as a sliding grey scale, with neither religious nor a-religious camps having a monopoly on a certain shade.

  yes, this oversymplifies. and doesn’t address the individual’s ability to change their proclivities etc…
  it’s just a thought.

  I like your code for grounding yourself.

• 8 Craig // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:23 pm

  Rich, I think that Christianity has done so because the humans involved intuitively knew that it is wrong to harm others/good to treat others with kindness – and not because a supernatural deity told some small group of humans something new or revelatory. That theme is common to many religions, and a simple outgrowth of natural (evolutionary) morality of humans.

  What is really sad is that Christianity, (or any other religion), has got such a strong motivational force for its followers to do harm in the name of “god” and virtue. Religion makes anyone outside the community as not deserving the same in-community treatment and morality, and very, very often can dehumanise anyone who is different, which leads too many followers of religion to disregard their inherent morality and conscience and bring harm to others.

• 9 Denine // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:45 pm

  Jane speaks my mind. I never knew Aristotle said anything like that. Having philosopher finger puppets is about as close as I will go to philosophy. But now that I know that Aristotle said this, I feel a little warmer towards him.

  Also, I look towards the stars. I can’t believe this is the only planet with life on it. Looking to the stars reminds me 1) of the need to be responsible towards all life on this planet, and 2) reminds me how small and insignificant we are. It’s nice to be reminded that we are not the be-all and end-all.

• 10 Mark // Jan 30, 2009 at 1:46 pm

  I agree with your thoughts. We do not have to be religious to be morally ground. We do have an intrinsic understanding of good and evil.
  I am grounded in knowing that we are all connected, that everything and everyone has a purpose and that in the end it is all about love.

• 11 Roy // Jan 30, 2009 at 4:59 pm

  My perspective of morality tends to be based on my understanding of obligations towards other lives. I think that I have an obligation to treat others with respect to their rights.
  I generally think that doing what is right and moral is not necessarily easy, but morality is a guideline for how we ought to treat other people. A simple, if imperfect, guidelines for moral living is the standard “treat others as you would want and expect to be treated.” Not perfect, but pretty useful for most situations. If I see a wallet on the ground and I’m tempted to keep the money in it, I consider “Okay, if someone found my wallet on the ground, would I want them to take the money out of it?” The answer is no, obviously. Now, I think that there are more in-depth reasons why taking the money is wrong, relating to issues of personal property, respect for other people’s right to ownership, and respect for the fruits of our labors, but as a simple guideline, I find that putting myself as much as possible into another person’s shoes does the trick most of the time. But, then, I’m a little Rawlsian when it comes to morality.

  Now to completely contradict my overly simplistic perspective on morality:

  We do have an intrinsic understanding of good and evil.

  I have trouble with this idea. I wish it were so, but looking at the ways that people treat each other and the world around them suggests to me that we don’t.

  Honestly, I actually think that being a moral person is work. Sometimes really hard work. I think that it takes a certain level of effort to look at the world around you and at your own actions and figure out what the right thing is, particularly once you get past the sort of obvious examples.

  I think that it’s pretty easy to get to the realization that murder (defined here as the unjust killing of another person) is wrong, generally speaking, but once you get past the sort of obvious cases, figuring out whether something is good or bad is work. In our daily lives, most of our moral choices are not “Should I unjustly kill this person” but, rather “should I lie to this person that I care about because I think that the truth is going to hurt that person more than the lie?” or “should I buy this product, even though it might come from a place that exploits workers or was tested on animals or contains things that might harm the environment, because it is cheaper than the alternatives, and I don’t have very much money?”

• 12 Chandelle // Jan 30, 2009 at 10:38 pm

  I don’t have anything substantial to add…everyone else has defined my morality quite well.

  I just wanted to mention a memory that this post conjured for me. Shortly after I left the Church, my sister-in-law, a hard person at the best of times, interrogated me about my new moral position. She simply could not – COULD NOT – wrap her head around why a person would be good without God. She truly believed that, without a society centered on religion, we’d all be killing each other in the streets. Why wouldn’t you just spend all your time stealing and lying to get whatever you want? she asked. If there’s no punishment for badness and no reward for goodness, what’s the point?

  That statement made me feel sick, to consider that there are truly some people who cannot fathom any good reason to be kind or honest unless by threat or promise of reward. That strikes me as the worst kind of inhumanity and, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me.

• 13 xJane // Jan 31, 2009 at 7:39 am

  Chandelle—your experience reminds me of one of mine, although in mine, my sister told me that moral relativists (like me) could only exist because moral absolutists (like her) allow them to…I’ve been trying for years to figure out what the hell she meant, since it seems to be that it’s the other way around!

• 14 chosha // Jan 31, 2009 at 8:57 am

  I think good exists beyond the concept of God. Even when I had a surety of belief, I still believed, not that God was the author of what was good, but rather that God was good because he obeyed eternal law by choice.

  I think that a lot of gray areas exist. It’s not that there is no right action in these situations, but rather that the most right action is hard to determine. Religion can blind a believer to the complexity of some of these choices and in doing so simplify their lives. Which seems attractive, but can result in them doing what is simple and straight forward and easily understood from a particular doctrinal perspective, as opposed to what is actually (and, if you take a step back, often obviously) right.

  But how do I ground myself? At the moment I don’t think I do. But then I’ve only been ex-LDS for such a very short time. I’m still figuring it all out. I know I believe in the idea of redemption – that a new start is possible and that people can, and have the right, to change and be forgiven for past wrongs. It’s only recently that I really understood that this concept does not rely on a ’saviour’. It really just relies on a realistic understanding of what it means to be human and flawed and yet yearn to be better all the same.

  People ask God for forgiveness – and I’m not discrediting them – but still crave absolution from those they have wronged. Sometimes I wonder if we ask for forgiveness from God because people are so unwilling to let things go.

• 15 Parker // Jan 31, 2009 at 9:10 am

  Now that I am clearly on the downside of life’s hill, and having been “good” as religiously defined for so many years I find that I now regret that I hadn’t been “badder” instead.

  Parker

• 16 Craig // Jan 31, 2009 at 3:49 pm

  Parker,

  I know what you mean – for me, being “good” meant no sex, no alcohol, coffee, tea, no intellectual freedom, etc.

  Being “bad” or “evil” or “unrighteous” as defined by Mormonism in particular is so, so much more fun and fulfilling and healthy.

  Chosha, yeah, I agree with your last statement. I think that we only need to seek forgiveness from ourselves, because even if we’ve wronged someone else, their withholding forgiveness doesn’t mean we can’t move on and learn from our mistakes.

• 17 So, are you enjoying your exmormon despair and unhappiness yet? | Main Street Plaza // Feb 1, 2009 at 12:06 am

  [...] position was extreme…and they noted that atheists could be good people (something that John at mind on fire wrote about recently as well…), Jon continued in his position: Lots of assumptions are being made about the virtues of [...]

• 18 Sunday in Outer Blogness: Lite ‘n Crunchy Edition! | Main Street Plaza // Feb 1, 2009 at 8:38 am

  [...] slightly more serious topics (this is the crunchy part), John Remy asks How can atheists be good without God? Christopher Smith gives a fairly negative review to Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck. [...]

• 19 This just in: atheism is equivalent to murder « Irresistible (Dis)Grace // Feb 1, 2009 at 11:26 am

  [...] Jon didn’t mean something else. Some people, in believing that atheists are incapable of morality without god, might suggest that atheism leads people to be more prone to commit murders. But fortunately, Jon [...]

• 20 chosha // Feb 1, 2009 at 4:27 pm

  Craig: I think we need to seek forgiveness from those we wrong (wrong, not merely offend) because that’s appropriate. But I agree that their withholding of forgiveness is not our issue and shouldn’t bar us from moving on.

• 21 Elise // Feb 1, 2009 at 5:47 pm

  Fascinating post and discussion. I think a large portion of my “morality” is grounded in a deep respect for my ancestors. I’m lucky enough to have several grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, along with many other family members, who have kept articulate records of their lives, decisions, outcomes, experiences, and wisdom.

  There are several fortunate things about my life (my freedom as a woman, my educational opportunities, my work ethic) that I see as a direct result of good – although sometimes difficult – decisions those who came before me made.

  On the contrary, there are some problems, unforgiven crossings, and traumatising events that have been passed down through generations along with the good. I can directly see how some of my character flaws and some difficult circumstances in my extended family are a direct result of poor choices made by those who came before me.

  With that foundation, when I am presented with a difficult choice in life, and can’t immediately see what the moral choice is, I ask myself how the outcomes of different options may effect my family and future generations. I suppose this is somewhat similar to John’s sense of duty toward his family and relationships.

  Of course, I still often make choices that are purely selfish without paying much attention to how my actions will affect others, but realistically most of humanity is afflicted with the same.

• 22 xJane // Feb 2, 2009 at 8:41 am

  chosha @14—that’s the classic debate, isn’t it? Either what is good is good because god says it is (which makes good a capricious, rather than an immutable concept) or good is good despite god’s actions (which means that god is not The Ultimate, since even He has to obey the eternal concept of “good”).

• 23 chosha // Feb 2, 2009 at 2:25 pm

  I know some people see the dichotomy that way, but I don’t think recognising and obeying good law diminishes personal power. He doesn’t have to obey, which was always kind of the point for me. If God authored what it means to be ‘good’ then good becomes an arbitrary measure of right and wrong. I know relative goods exist, but I still believe there are absolute goods; moral laws that transcend (even as they tend to permeate) individual societies.

  It’s interesting, that idea that God must have authored good because otherwise he isn’t omnipotent. My question is, why do people need him to be all-powerful? I think I can survive if God doesn’t manage to build a rock so big he can’t carry it. I’m kind of floored by the centuries people have spent debating things that just don’t matter.

• 24 Craig // Feb 2, 2009 at 2:46 pm

  I think that one of those things that “just don’t matter” is whether there is god(s) at all. Whether or not there is/are, doesn’t really have any bearing on our ability as humans to freely make our own choices, and our ability to define for ourselves, our societies what is good and what is evil.

  Because all of humanity is now one community (more or less), we can work together and define what is good for all of us, not just what is good for a small group (say one particular religion or country). And this is where the concept of “human rights” comes from. We don’t need a god, and we don’t need to know whether there is a god, and whether s/he is bound by or authored morality, or something else entirely to know that all humans should be treated equally and with respect. To worry about whether there is some overarching absolute moral authority puts the responsibility off of the shoulders of the individual, and onto a probably imaginary being – and that is very dangerous.

  We need to take responsibility for our own actions, our own beliefs, and our own morality. I really think that is the only way we will ever truly become a moral society that does not have and is not driven by sexism, racism, heterosexism and homophobia, nationalism, ethnocentrism, etc. For the problem is that every person creates their own god in their own image, and that god then gives them divine licence to treat other humans with contempt, because they have the “wrong” god or god-concept.

  In other words, I think that religion and god-worship are directly at odds with universal human rights and good morality.

• 25 xJane // Feb 2, 2009 at 6:01 pm

  two links to share with one & all:

  the less religious countries are, the more healthy & successful they are

  if this is true for states, the information in a recent survey about the religiosity of each State in the Union may be helpful

• 26 Lifelong Work-in-process: Forgiveness « Irresistible (Dis)Grace // Feb 3, 2009 at 6:35 am

  [...] 3, 2009 So, I was thinking on John’s post at Mind on Fire about Being Good without God, and I’m not saying I wanted to steal his post and write up my own ideas on the bases of my [...]

• 27 xJane // Feb 3, 2009 at 12:13 pm

  from a friend’s Facebook page (the 25 Things is going around & he caught it):
  

  9. I am an Agnostic Atheist. My purpose and contentedness with life and who I am, has not been ever so clear to me since becoming one. To me, It’s like finally turning the light on after being raised in the dark.

  10. I can NOT lie. I am just not good at it. Plus it’s wrong

  I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition given our current conversation.

• 28 Craig // Feb 5, 2009 at 12:59 am

  Thanks xJane for the links to those articles. Those very reasons are why I am such an advocate of increased secularisation being necessary to our wellbeing as a global society.

• 29 Zach // Feb 7, 2009 at 7:28 pm

  A lot of most people’s morality, I think, is not just about God or some other vertical authority, but about horizontal peer pressure and social conformity. As someone who is not only rejects the former but also isn’t very susceptible to the latter, I think I’ve had a particularly difficult time figuring out how/why to be moral in a universe where there is no God.

  More and more I keep coming back to empathy/compassion, a sense of connection to other people, as the why and how.

  Which surprised me at first, because when I was religious, I always thought compassion was rather small beer, at least compared to the transcendent sense of duty to God.

• 30 A Superfluous Ramble Humanist Symposium #32 // Feb 8, 2009 at 3:49 am

  [...] – Being Good without God This criticism targets the moral relativism of unbelievers. Without absolutes as anchors, aren’t [...]

• 31 Cat C-B // Feb 8, 2009 at 7:50 am

  Interestingly enough, I come up with a different answer when I consider this question in the abstract than when I personalize it! I have never doubted that atheists have every bit as much ability to be good as religious people, and find the whole notion of a need for the guidance of religion, and in particular, monotheistic religion, as a necessary precondition for good behavior to be insulting.

  I think I’m with x-Jane, in that I think it is impossible to be deeply happy and deliberately do harmful, wrong things. Never thought of that as Aristotelian, but if it is, so am I, I guess.

  I’m not an atheist, however, and I do have a sense that people are very good at self-deception and complacency; we often do wrong without noticing it or understanding it, or because we have allowed ourselves to become mired in self-interest or falsehood. Just one of our talents as a big-brained critter…

  So, personalizing the question, I find that there is, at any rate, a place for God in my quest for right action in the world, and I feel that Quaker meeting helps me to find it. Like many other commenters here, I agree that we do have inward compasses to guide us–but I think there are times when a little outside help is needed to break through cultural blindness and personal fog. I also sense that the more honest I am with myself and the more attuned to my own inward compass I work to become, the more often and the more powerfully that force of love and peace that is more than myself–”God” for short, however it may distort the discussion–can reach me through it.

  When I’ve done my own work, my sense is that God can reach in and gently but powerfully ring that inward sense like a bell, and I can Just Know things about morality I never did before.

  Odd, that my answer from my ideas, and my personal answer from lived experience, are so different!

• 32 nolrai // Feb 12, 2009 at 8:45 am

  I guess in some sense I am a moral relativist. Quite frankly moral absolutism is obviously nonsensical to me (which probably means there exists some assumption I am unable to examine). I have morals but all they are are my morals. I mean there’s no way to evaluate a set morals without using a set of morals. I fact to me the existence or not of God is irrelevant. Even if God existed, the only possible right thing for me to do would be to fallow my morals, because they are what *I* have.
  E.g. Gods commands would only be right if they were good by my standards.
  Now, it turns out that for pretty much all of my goals I require at least the tacit approval of a portion of society, and many of my goals require that large portions of the human race continue to work on them long after I am dead. So I have to pool my resources with others, and agree to do things I might not wish to, even immoral things, so that together we can accomplish great things.

• 33 xJane // Feb 12, 2009 at 11:28 am

  Cat C-B: “we often do wrong […] because we have allowed ourselves to become mired in […] falsehood”; I think this is an argument that can be made for either atheists or religionists. Justification of our own actions is universal. But I also think it’s a great quote

• 34 John // Feb 19, 2009 at 7:13 pm

  There was a comment in the moderation queue that was pro-atheist morality, but was also a long essay I found copied dozens of times across the web. I count this sort of thing as spam. I prefer my post threads to be more like conversations, where we pretend to listen to each other before making an ostensibly original contribution to the discussion.

  Thankfully, I don’t have to delete comments very often. But I thought I’d let you all know what I just did.

• 35 Sapphire Sky - KnightLight // Mar 3, 2009 at 6:29 pm

  There is a way to be good without beleiveing in god… and that is by loving God or all good things…even in the bad things…the strength lies in understanding that these things are worth fighting for NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS!

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