If there is no God anything is possible

God or heaven keep us from sinning, it is widely believed. Many refrain from doing sinful things just because there is some heavenly body there always watching you and since God is omnipresent you cannot do anything trespassing.
Imagine there is no heaven. Man is just an animal and all that animals do is behave instinctively. There is no greater wisdom than instincts.

But man has evolved and is evolving constantly and man does not run after instincts and he does have some higher kinds of wisdom.

Religions though mostly are illogical and unscientific but in some cases religions keep people from straying from discipline.

While there are a few learned atheists who do not need God but the majority want to believe in God since belief in God help them to live in harmony with their fellow beings.

 

Is your position that human morality is divinely inspired or required, or derived only from a human belief in God?

 

All I mean to say that there is some connection between religion, God and moral senses and if one has to break this connection it is likely to disrupt the harmony that integrates all

 

That sounds as if you believe if one has a non-religious background, their moral compass may be broken. What about folks who are highly moral, ethical and honest, and live very upright and appropriate lives while having no faith at all? That happens worldwide in high numbers. I grew up in a religious family so I cannot attest to that side of the argument, but I can see the views of atheists and agnostics who have moral mindsets and who have no more desire to act immorally than anyone else, regardless of their lack of belief in a higher being.

 

All atheists at some points in their lives must have belonged to some religions and their moral bases could have been founded on religious pillars though they might have later on discarded them.

 

I understand but I don't totally agree. My grandmother, for example, was never exposed to religion other than what she saw of her friends growing up. Her family wasn't atheist, but rather just didn't have religious exposure and harbored no feelings toward it. Today she is an atheist, but has never believed in a god her entire life. She didn't derive her stance from moving from religious to non-religious, but rather she affirmed her lack of belief later in life to lay claim to being atheist rather than agnostic. However, she's a highly moral and honest person and holds herself and others to very high standards of personal conduct.

 

I agree that some can use myths as a crutch to be more moral, many do not need the crutch, some also use myths to be less moral...


.

 

almost all Children in America believed in Santa too, some of their beliefs about good and bad came from that myth as well, IE the naughty and nice list, lump of coal, ect...

myths and fairy tails can be used as teaching tools if used in the right way, no doubt about that

.

 

I am an atheist,. I do not know if my parents were. as religion was never spoke about either positively or negatively. So, I was just left to form my own opinion. I regard myself as moral and upstanding, yet I have had no exposure to religion

 

The way I've heard it is that if a person is a true atheist then they must be a nihilist, because if one believes there is no God then that automatically equates to believing that life is meaningless.

...and even if a person believes there is a purpose to life despite there being no god, then that's actually the same as believing there is a god. Since a purpose more or less has the same function as a God, therefore a purpose is a God.

So for example if an atheist says that religions are fairty tales, but believes that a person "should not" believe in fairy tales - then deep down this means they really know there is a purpose (aka a God).

Since if they were truly an atheist then they wouldn't have any reason to believe that believing in fairy tales is "wrong".

 

This is true. And it does not mean faith has no values. Faith has its own significance and it keeps people from straying. Atheism is not always right and theists are not always wrong. Theism, religion, metaphysics have their own contributions that helped to understand human life better. Jesus is not totally fake and all that the Bible stands for is not against humanity. Though I am not guided by the teachings of scriptures totally but it does not mean that I have not profited from religious faith. Indeed religions help and in fact have helped us to evolve and ascend stairs of civilzation to some extent whether atheists agree or not

 

While much good has been done in its name Religion is overall more a justification for doing evil than a cause tor doing good. Religion is the handmaiden of absolutist and/or totalitarian government, the ethical/moral underpinning of oppression. Why do you think the putative"Right" of Kings to tyrannize us all is called "Divine"?

 

If morals are not derived from God then society defines it. In actuality, morality is not inherent it must be given.

 

Some of the most revered work in philosophy comes to us from cultures that had no single god, but a variety of gods with various characteristics, objectives and even flaws. And, that work was not handed down from on high.

Plus, your claim would have it that all of Asia has no morality - which is obviously false.

If you want to find the sources of morality you have to do far better than just guessing that it came from your concept of god.

 

As I said, if morality does not come from God then it comes from society itself. Unless Asia has no societies then my statement is true.

 

This is mostly a historical effect. The idea that God's watching is what keeps us from immoral behaviour is in turn a learnt idea. As someone else pointed out, many who are brought up in non-religious households end up quite moral. However, look at those who ended up not so moral. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler (according to some) were all brought up religiously, and taught that their morality was linked to God. When their belief in God subsided, they lost their justification for morality. If they had been brought up non-religiously from the start, and taught that morality stems from our relation to humanity, or unwavering hypotheticals, it is not so clear that they would have ended up where they ended up.

So religion should not be fought thoughtlessly or hurriedly.

 

Who says Stalin was not moral? Who defines what morality is?

See my point?

 

Well, it discourages “sinning” but it clearly doesn’t prevent it completely. There is also the question of what any given religion considers “sin” varies massively so discouraging “sin” doesn’t automatically discouraging “bad behaviour” by more general definition.

Regardless of the existence of heaven, human beings have the intelligence, imagination and self-consciousness to choose to override our instincts, at least looking at a bigger picture or the longer term.

Certainly, though other times religion leads people to much worse things. From an entirely temporal point of view, there’s nothing special about religion compared to any other philosophy or set of moral principles. It’s really just a label applied to certain kinds.

 

I think you said morality must be "given". Maybe I don't understand what you mean for morality to be given by "society itself".

I don't believe Plato was "given" anything more than a good mind.

 

I meant given in the sense that society defines it. For instance, there is nothing written in the cosmos saying that killing your wife is wrong but society, or God, tells us that is wrong and defines the punishments.

 

I think it is better to pick some issue other than murder to trace, since murder has never been OK.

If you pick something like slavery, what you find is that people tell society rather than society telling people.

Society (at one time) was perfectly OK with slavery. And, that included Christian society as noted in the Bible.

So, the decision that slavery isn't moral came from people who did not accept what is said in the bible and did not accept what society was doing.

 

And where does it say slavery is immoral without those around you telling you so? Is it carved into a giant rock somewhere or written in the stars?

Nope

Therefore, only society can determine what is moral or a divine being?

 

this is true, in order to get people to stop stoning people for picking up sticks on the weekend, ect..., Christianity was needed, it's easier to get religious fanatics to move to a new religion if they believe it's still the same religion then to get them to give up on the old one cold turkey

.

 

I ask this question honestly and with no malintent. What are the significant voluntary based charities that are not faith based?

Christianity has a huge presence in doing good worldwide based in volunteerism. I know there must be secular/athiest voluntary charitable organizations, but I don't know what they are.

Personally, I know for a fact that there are moral non-believers and, as a Christian, I do not consider them wicked, evil or deserving of eternal torment(false doctrine imo). Yet, I do not see atheistic based charities, to a large degree, from them. I mostly see non-religious charity based in using government forced programs.

 

I wasn't previously aware of their existence, but found the following from the UK:

https://humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanism-today/humanists-doing/good-causes-and-charities/