Why ever so, when nobody's watching?
Nobody's watching? Are you familiar with — police officers?
Man, using reason, has created man-made laws for the good of society.
If there is no God, then I can crush whomever bothers me, Stalin-style, and please myself.
If you are willing to risk spending the rest of your life in prison, or being executed (and then having your execution cheered by the audience at a Republican debate), try it. I recommend strongly against it, obviously.
But do you think that any god, goddess, or godling is going to stop you? Did God stop all of the carnage between the religious sects? Did God stop the Nazis from killing millions of Jews? (And, under the standard doctrine of Christianity, the Jews who were gassed woke up in Hell afterward, because they did not believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior. That must have been a bummer.) Is there also an animalian hell for, say, the sharks who attack and kill children at the beach?
Did God even stop Stalin?
Besides, if you believe in predestination — a tenet of at least one particular Christian sect, the Calvinists — it doesn't matter anyway. The thing about the Bible is that it's such a contradictory muddle that one can find passages to support or refute anything, but consider Romans 9:14-18:
14 What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
16
It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. 17 For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” 18
Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. And don't bother complaining about the confounded unfairness of it all, as Paul said in the next three verses:
19 One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” 20 But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” 21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?
Look — it would be great to have a control on human behavior by having a system that declares that misconduct will result in eternal damnation. The problem, however, is that experience has not borne out the efficacy of such a system. There are multiple religious faiths out there, and the divinity (or divinities) are apparently too busy to stop by Planet Earth and say what the right answers are. The holy books are dense and contradictory, with specific passages invoked as gospel one century and dismissed as having been "misinterpreted" in another.
The Biblical passages about homosexuality are examples of passages that are cited as the law from on high by one group and dismissed or ignored by another group.
There are indeed people who control their behavior for the better because of religious faith, but there are also those who engage in misbehavior because of religious faith. I am just sick and tired of people invoking the Big Man in the Sky to kick other people down, and, when hearing a complaint, say something to the effect of, "You'll just have to take it up with God."
I say, "Why can't God come down and fix the problem Himself?"
Perhaps the best words on the subject are those of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
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Aulic Exclusiva
11 years ago
So the police is the source of all morality. Interesting ethic.
Scostatevi profani! Melpomene son io...
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