“Live a good life”
Question, what is good? Hanging out with the squatters on wall street raping, stealing and attacking cops?

“If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been…”
Conjecture, opinion and irrelevant. Just in whose eyes? He is so arrogant as to believe he knows what God would think. Yes, I’m sure God would be happy with jack-legs who make light of His existence. Pure stupidity.

“If there are gods, but unjust”
Question. How can an atheist deem anything unjust? His opinion? Pointless rhetoric with no basis.

“But will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
Your loved will be dead then what? If your loved ones also squat on wall street with the other putrid vagrants who live in the squalor, then you do have some wonderful memories to look back on.

Despite his bizarre confounding of the issue with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, Pryor and with him 40YA [11] and Joel [18] raise a common question: without gods, how can we know what a good life is, or what justice is? Despite Pryor’s rudeness, the question is frequent enough that it needs to be answered.

Plato considered this when, in his writings, he had Socrates asks Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” In other words, if we accept that God is good, does God define what goodness is, or is goodness something independent, and God is good. It’s an important distinction.

Take, for example, Pryor’s first question, and the fact that Jesus was frequently seen “hanging out with the squatters” and according to the Old Testament, the Israelites were experts at “raping, stealing, and attacking” their enemies. So actually, yes, those things must be good, if God wills them. But obviously, the Pryor doesn’t feel they are good, so something odd is going on here—Pryor has a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from Scripture.

We all have this sense, and it is surprisingly uniform between people and between faiths. One of the biggest differences in morality is that some moral codes insist that you be kind to everyone, while some only insist that you be kind to those of your race, nation or religion. But kindness has existed in all cultures throughout history, whether they worshipped this god or that one. It is not as if Christian missionaries showed up in the new world and taught the natives an amazing new concept of “how to be nice to each other”—if anything, they taught the opposite.

Most people feel that “God is good” means “there is a thing called goodness, and I know it when I see it—and God matches that.” They are happy if they think God helped them out because they know what helping out feels like. They can legitimately ponder the questions of whether God accepting Jephthah’s daughter as a human sacrifice, or God sending two bears to kill the forty-two boys who teased Elisha, was “good”.

The only person this would make no sense to is someone who sees of Socrates’ dilemma the other way around: an act is defined as good because God does it. God was right to send the bears, because “right” means “approved by God”, so it must be. If we feel squeamish, it is because our modern age has made us soft—true believers murder, rape and steal in the name of the Lord in it’s all OK. This is the opinion, I have to assume, of the Lord’s Resistance Army or al-Qaeda. At least this belief is internally consistent.

The problem with that stance is that the new truth shifts from “God is good” to “God is what God likes”. Under those circumstances, there is no more reason for us to obey God than there is for us to obey a king, a tyrant or a despot. If God’s will is that we simply do as he says because he says it, there is no reason to prefer it, except to escape his wrath or incur his favor. God commandments would therefore not make us wise, but servile.

I prefer to avoid this question altogether by insisting that an omnipotent power doesn’t make sense in the first place. That leaves me, as Pryor points out, with nothing but my own conscience for guidance. Damn. I guess I’ll just have to live with it. But almost all of us have a conscience, and our consciences almost always agree on the big picture: “Treat people as you want to be treated, don’t use people if it hurts them, take care of others.” The details that we argue over—sex, punishment, taxes—these are all understood in light of the big picture. Yes, Pryor, there may be no ultimate answer and I am OK with that. And what if people disagree with me? Well, that’s always going to happen, God or not. That’s life.

Given that, back to Marcus Aurelius’ three possibilities. If God is good (as defined by my conscience), he would understand if I, like Bertrand Russell, were to tell him that I based my honest beliefs on the evidence I saw, and He simply didn’t provide it. If God is actually the kind of guy who appreciates cruelty—the vain, jealous bigot who endorses genocide, sends earthquakes when he is mad and sends us, his favored creations, to Hell if the weaknesses he made in us are swayed by the temptations he put in our path—then he can go fuck himself.

And if, as I suspect, we are only on this earth a brief while after which we will simply be a memory, then a historical record, then nothing? Well. Then that is what we have. Be good, and make this fragile, temporary world a better place, not a worse one. If these brief years are all we have, that’s all the more reason to make them beautiful and compassionate—we aren’t being tested for eternity: we are eternity, crammed into one little lifetime.

“That shows you are very mature and full of wisdom.”

That shows that you are either an idiot or a liar.

“Actually, atheism has more unanswered questions than any belief system out there.”

You lie. Atheism is not a belief system.

“Keep searching, the journey is a great part of the purpose to life.”

Keep lying. Deception is a great part of the delusion known as religion.

Black Wolf,

That shows you are very mature and full of wisdom. Every belief system has unanswered questions. Some just admit it while others refuse to acknowledge the fact.

Most atheist fall in to the later category when confronted with their own. Actually, atheism has more unanswered questions than any belief system out there.

Keep searching, the journey is a great part of the purpose to life.

Then you need to ask yourself why you believe them…

“I must concede, it seems as if the bible is exceedingly cherry picked.”

The Bible is not cherry picked… all of the good and bad is right there for the viewing… it’s the “faithful” that do the cherry picking, choosing only to acknowledge the good parts and being willfully ignorant to the obviously bad parts….

“I believe that while some parts are real, some parts MAY be falsified…”

I take it you do not accept the concept of the bible as the inerrant word of god, guarded by the holy spirit so that it’s content cannot be altered to interfere with god’s message to his people?
In that case how do you know which parts are really god’s word and which parts are not? And moreover, why would god ALLOW his divine word to be “falsified”? Doesn’t sound like the perfect plan of a perfect being who causes everything to happen according to his will, does it?

You are free to share thoughts here. But what is the purpose of sharing thoughts if you are not prepared to discuss and defend them??? That’s not discussion, that’s preaching. As I said before, this is not your church where you are surrounded by like minded people who seek to validate each other. The fact that you hold a “personal belief” does not grant you immunity from criticism just because it is religious in nature. The story f Adam and Eve is a fable with no basis in fact… at all. The fact that someone holds it as a religious belief does not isolate it from criticism. Sorry if that seems harsh or unfair to you. It’s not meant to be mean spirited, but if you’re going to participate here, be prepared to be challenged.

Then how do you know what or who to believe? It sounds like you are willing to redefine your god to be whatever or whoever you want him to be as long as it suits your expectation of your ideal god.

Whilst you are rereading your bible, you might want to add this to your reading list:

The ONLY thing you know about “god” is that book of ink and paper. Your “god” has never communicated to you in any way.