badgenome said:
You keep saying "if". There is no if. He is undeniably correct that non-believers can be just as moral as believers. He is equally correct that people have done incredibly wicked things in the name of God which they would otherwise have had a difficult time justifying. Is your question where morality comes from if not from God? |
While I agree that monotheistic religion specifically is and always has been bullshit. I must say, that the notion that "they would have more trouble justifying atrocities without the name of God behind them" is quite incorrect. There is a LOT of modern day evil, that has nothing at all to do with spiritual belief of any sort, shape or fashion. Real, tangible financial evil, perpetrated by many of the "power elite" and super rich, all in the name of saving a buck and making a profit. There are countries like China (and communist Russia in the past), for example, who committed great atrocities against their own people, but not in the name of religion (because they held religion as dangerous to "The State" and looked down upon it). While Iraq is a heavily Muslim country, Saddam Hussein himself was not a religious man, and perpetrated great evil against his own people, not in the name of Allah, but in the name of paranoid, greed, and love of power. Politicians on Capitol Hill right now, constantly making decisions most certainly not in the best interests of the American people, while many of them might hide behind a false pretense of being "religious" to appeal to dumb, ignorant rednecks, they are in fact making shitty decisions "for us" based not on what we the voters want or need, but what the super rich and lobbyists representing special interests (such as Wall Street, Big Oil, and the NRA, just as a few examples) want, all in the name of profit and making more and more and more money.
I would say the love of money and extreme greed and averice are the new cause of attrocity worldwide these days. Yes, there are millions of ignorant, frighteningly fanatical and ignorant as hell Christians in the world (mostly located in America), and yes there are millions of crazy Muslim fundamentalists out there too. Hell, even though it's a "no no" to bring up, you've also got the State of Israel, which while it holds many good people as CITIZENS, it also represents one of the worst examples of a theocratic government on Earth, which carries out injustices to it's own people, and has carried out or aided in atrocities from Palestine all the way to South Africa and beyond. And surely, all in the name of being "God's Chosen People", protecting the "Holy Land", blah blah blah.
BUT, while I would certainly never argue that these "One God, One Truth" religions HAVEN'T caused incredible and almost unimaginable harm over the last 2 millennia or so, I WILL argue the notion that an atheist would be "More Moral" than someone with spiritual beliefs. A lot of people, for one thing, seem to conveniently forget that there are a LOT of other types of spirituality out there in the world than merely Monotheism. And that the world is not a Black or White partition devided between those who believe in some monotheistic, dogmatic "God", or those who only believe in scientific study. There are PLENTY of other spiritula types who have nothing to do with "religion", per say. But beyond that, is the fact that, as already stated, I think the modern love of money alone proves to be more than enough to fuel not only man's inhumanity to man, but indeed, his ruthless and selfish destruction of entire other species of life, and the destruction of our own environment and planet. And while much of that is often supported by the "Christian Right", etc., they only do so because they're told to by those who love, not "God", but money and power, and get the ignorant believers to fall in line believing that whatever they're told "is what God wants", must be true. Religion is a big part of the problem, but it's not the ROOT of the problem. Not anymore.
