Honestly the whole "if there's no god then how do you know right from wrong" argument is astounding to me, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. -- Penn Jillette
Hell, I'm not even an atheist, but if someone actually came up to me with this kind of shit, I'd run as fast as I could. Like, why would you want to rape or murder in the first place? If you need to be threathened with eternal torture in order to be a good person, then maybe you're not a good person.
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Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?
Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths...
This right here is the answer. Religion was an effective way to control many psychopaths. Very useful before there was an effective legal system and police force.
"So what you're saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you're not a murdering rapist pedophile?"
I feel like this question is often pulled up in these conversations and it's rather disingenuous.
Or rather it is taken disingenuously.
This question is not meant to say that if you didn't have Jesus you would be a sadistic cannibal sociopath.
This question comes from the idea that what is God is good, and therefore if you don't have God, you can't possibly know what is good in a true and eternal fundamental sense, far beyond simple right and wrong.
Because if you think about it, if there is a God, then the universe and everything in it belongs to them, right?
And whatever they decide is good for their universe is the absolute barometric truth of what is good, right?
But far too often people are not able to encapsulate that thought and communicate it effectively when talking to people who are outside of their circles and areas of specialized knowledge, and therefore something gets lost in the translation even though the language stays the same.
This is a common issue in any field that gets excessively specialized, and it is typically exacerbated by the people who are inside the field, but not so far advanced into the field that they are aware of those pitfalls and how to navigate them.
So yeah, they're not saying if it wasn't for God they would rape and murder and kill and exploit. They're saying that because of God they have a concept of something that is eternally true regardless of your individual impression of it, And if there was no God, there would be no thing like that in existence.
Honestly, I think it is disingenuous, and the argument is loaded. Namely, if a believer does effectively communicate the notion that God has some universal, eternally-true standard of morality, then the person making the argument can spring the trap:
If that standard of morality exists, we don't know it. God hasn't told us. The Bible is very definitely, historically the word of mankind. The standards it espouses have been relentlessly fought over by different religious factions with their own interpretations, and what's more, they're internally self-contradictory.
The idea that religious people need the threat of hellfire to behave just doesn't stand to scrutiny, since so many of them have no problems professing an interpretation of God's morality to justify whatever behavior they want.
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But here's the thing, even if there is a God we all agree he's not communicating. If you believe in the Bible then you have a set of rules given by him, but most of them don't apply anymore. So it's very pick and choose even for people who believe in God. Therefore it's disingenuous to claim there wouldn't be a distinction from good and evil without God, when you can't agree among yourselves what is good and what is evil. At the end of the day, even IF God existed and IF the bible was his written word, you have to choose between slavery being okay or shrimps being evil, there's no in-between, either those are the rules or they aren't, if those are the rules then eating shrimp is evil just like murdering, cutting your beard, laying with another man or wearing mixed fabric clothes, all sins, all equally bad. If those are not the rules then how do you know what's good? How do you know what God thinks is good? What's the point of the Bible if you're not accepting the rules there?
At the end of the day everyone has their own morality, and that's easily demonstrable, pick two people from the same religion and ask them questions on morally ambiguous things until they disagree. If their morality was indeed given by a single entity it would be unique. That's not the case, therefore their morality doesn't come from the same entity, therefore they also don't know right from wrong because of religion.
Pascal's Wager
"My God thinks I should drink, and do drugs, and rob the blind and sick. I'm not entirely sure if that's right, but I should do those things just in case I have to to get into his good graces."
Even they have to think it sounds pretty silly when you turn it around on them.
'If God isn't real, why do you say oh my God?'
That was from the deputy head of my school...
Holy shit
Godly excrement exists. QED.
Fucking hell
Proof it's getting hot in here
Cowabunga
... I'm not really sure about that one, never mind.
The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don't read it.
I had one guy who told me that he believed that God made the white people.
And that the black people evolved from monkeys.
And the people like me who are Native American and the Indians and Chinese and whatnot are all products of miscegenation between the white people who have souls and the black people who do not.
Surprisingly, being told that i am the proud possessor of some undefinable fraction of a human soul was not enough to get me to participate in their religion.
This really makes me rethink a lot of my core beliefs. I used to believe that racism is an ancient problem that we will one day overcome, but after reading this, I believe new types of racism can still be invented, and we have to fight those too.
So god copied an existing product, changed superficial details, and added his holy trademark?
Confirmed Bill Gates is God
All of them.
They're all stupid.
Not necessarily God but intelligent design. I saw someone talk about a banana being the perfect fruit and how well it matched the shape of our hands. So obviously someone planned that out. Must've been God, the same being that releases half a dozen new apple varieties every season.
Sounds like someone who's never seen a wild banana.
The banana is one of the earliest cultivated plants. It is specifically cultivated, by humans, precisely to be the best fruit possible.
Bananas rule, and we can thank their creator: 10,000 years of human ingenuity
That's an argument used by Ray Comfort and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron.
Chicken and Egg argument. Christian apologist said it's only a paradox for atheists. God just made eggs and chickens at the same time.
Of course, as an atheist who has seen dinosaur fossils... Eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens.
If there were no god wed all have no morals.
If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you're a pos to begin with?
I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There's a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren't the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn't really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I've never met anyone before who doesn't have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.
"It's not a cult." Wake up Karen, it's a cult.
"how else would you know the right thing to do?"
queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.
How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?
Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.
- Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It's one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn't hold.
- The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn't mean that within that system there can't be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to "order" - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.
Of course there's more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.
The sun rose today.
Mountains exist.
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