Is God The Basis For Our Morality

A correspondent writes the following to me”

“In regards to atheism, if you show me how something can come out of nothing I will convert to!”

Sure I can show you something that came out of nothing…the myth about gods…any god.  There was never any proof for any god…still isn’t, and yet some people swear that a god somehow controls who they are and what they do…what happened to free-will?
He then continues:

“Moreover my question in regards to killing was not why you wouldnt do it, its more of what instills that ideology or law in your persona. Why are we born with this mentality, who instilled it in us at birth?” <sic>

When early man was roaming the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago the evidence seems to show that humans hunted and killed each other with abandon. This went on for a looong time and probably reached its climax in early Biblical times and up until the Catholic Church was usurped as a political power over humans.  Nowadays there are so many of us and we have the ability to choose who rules over us (mostly), and it’s politically incorrect to kill citizens with abandon. Humans have the innate desire for self preservation and the smart ones realize that they must act with compassion towards others if they expect the same back to them.

Of course there are some religions that continue to kill with seemingly no consequences.  They do this by targeting enemies and citizens alike…scaring everyone to death.  Christianity’s last big fling at this process was Hitler’s time; who along with the explicit help of the Catholic Church (which was violently against Jews at the time) and eventually the Lutheran’s and such…contrived to wipe Jews off the face of the earth.  Of course we know they also went after the mentally deficient, the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s witnesses, some other small sects, and of course anybody who disagreed with them.

Muslims are pretty much stuck in the 7^th Century, where they will probably stay as long as the religion is allowed to continue.  In the Middle East and some other parts of the third world they (Muslim’s) continue to kill with impunity, and of course the leaders are fanatically trying to bring this practice to America.  The Muslim Allah is supposed to be the same as the Christian and Jewish God…is He (God/Allah/Yahweh) also instilling the same innate reverence for life and morality in the Muslim’s as Christianity is supposed to have.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that the argument that God/Allah/Yahweh provides humans with their basis for morals or reverence for life stands up.  It’s only the last few years that these things and the concurrent arguments have started to appear and that more or less seems to be simultaneous with higher civilization.

Early Christianity may have spouted morality, but the record shows that it is responsible for millions of deaths, what with all the many religious wars, which, by the way, continue today in many places in the world.

Also for your consideration is the Catholic/Spanish Inquisitions and the witch hunts of the Dark Ages in which as many as three million innocent people were put to death by “Christianity.”

We should also remember that the Spanish Christian’s of the 15^th and 16^th Century and the later European Christians killed or enslaved as many as 100,000,000 indigenous people of the North, Central, and South America, and all the Caribbean Islands.

I wonder where their God given morals and reverence for life was.

Don’t forget that the early Hebrews were killing men, women, and children, whole tribes and all their animals.  And their “God” was telling them to do this…

Religion/God/Allah/Yahweh has never been a sound basis for morality, and it’s certainly not instilled in us from birth by some non-existent spirit floating in the sky.

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Christian Rats in a Maze

“Under theism, we are nothing more than rats in a maze, running out our prearranged lives through arbitrary predetermined scenarios to a foreordained conclusion, never actually making any progress or accomplishing anything except satisfying the unknowable whim of the experimenter. I say this view of reality is both false and depressing. We can do better. We can tear down the walls of the maze and set our own course, throw the puzzles aside and find out the real reasons for things. We are awake, alive and free right here, right now, and we have lives to live and the whole wide universe to explore. Who needs a god?”  Ebon Musings

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Think about this you theists out there.  The Christian religion has it all figured out…there is no deviations allowed in the melodramatic script.  God planned all of this from the beginning and we figured it out from the beginning…we are predestined to follow the plot set up by God–our future is predetermined by God… Do you see the contradiction here?  So much for the free-will all the Christian apologists talk about.

I think all the Christians are just conned into their belief.  The writers of the Bible and all the writers that have pushed the silly stories on us are just part of the con.  They know it’s false and they have no proofs–at all—so they say you must have faith and the reason God doesn’t show himself is that would take away our free-will and ability to make a free choice—excuse me but that is bull-shit.  If the story is true, we have no free-will.

This whole religion, just like all others, stinks to high heaven. Its stories of God and the world are no more believable than those of Zeus, Brahma, Allah (whoops, that’s the same as the Christian God) Enlil, Horus, Isis, Juno, or any of the other hundreds and hundreds out there.  Even the Hebrews have a history of believing in other gods before they settled on JHWH about 590+- BC

Proof of this…the insane number of different ways to believe in this god.  There are over a thousand different sects—all claiming that only they have the keys to heaven—only they know what God wants us to do.  What hubris is this?

I’m going to be presumptuous here and show a little hubris also and say that if there really was a god…everybody would know it without a doubt…there would not be any argument about who has the “true” religion.  There would not be over a thousand different denominations fighting for dominance.  There never would have been those religious wars down through the ages wherein millions of innocent humans were killed in the name of “God.”  There would be no war between Muslims and Christians.

The Christians profess to believe in the ways of Jesus, but his message has been totally corrupted by all who followed him.  If Jesus (remember-He was also supposed to be God) was real, do you think his message would only be interpreted one way…or thousands?
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Free Will Doesn’t Cut It

“When people are trying to make a decision, not just about what’s real but about how to act on it, denying us relevant information does not make us more free. It makes us less free. In every area of life other than religion, this is clearly understood.  It’s the foundation of the principle of informed consent: when relevant information is denied us, our consent is impaired at best, and negated at worst. Having the best possible information about reality is essential to making good decisions about how to act in that reality.”  Greta Christina

So the Free-Will argument doesn’t cut it. The whole idea that if we have real factual evidence of God we wouldn’t be able to choose any other path…is a bogus argument promulgated by Christian apologists. Think back to your own Christian religious manual. If the book of Genesis and Exodus was true, the people following Moses through the desert for forty years supposedly had proof positive of the reality of Yahweh, but they went off and made golden statues, and worshipped them, and forgot all about what they were told and supposedly saw firsthand.  The very people (and there was reputedly a million or more of them) who were actually closest to this will-o’-wisp and whose leader talked to Him face to face, just blew Him off after a few days.

So we have a million people who “traveled with God”, supposedly saw His miracles, and then turned their back on him in a New York minute…how interesting/perplexing is that?

This is just one of the dumbfounding pieces of foolishness out of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that don’t add up to a rational religion.  Adding them all together proves it is a false religion…a man-made con.
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Did God Give US Free Will?

Do we REALLY have free will?

Some of the best known Christians in history have taught there is no free will, including St. Augustine , Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The Christian Bible states in many places that God creates our future and decides our fates. It constantly denies that we have free will. If God knows exactly what will happen, (Being omnipotent and omniscient of course) the status of choices as free, is questionable.

“Praise be to [God], who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” Ephesians 1:4-6 NIV

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Ephesians 2:4-10 NIV

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified” Romans 8:29-30 NIV

“Not only that, but Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad – in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls – she was told “The older will serve the younger”. Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated”. What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” Romans 9:10-15 NIV

“It does not therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed on all the earth.” [Exodus 9:16] Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” ” Romans 9:16-19

“[God] has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, ” 2 Timothy 1:9 NASB

“All people living on the Earth will worship [The Devil], except those whose names were written before the creation of the world in the book of the living which belongs to [Jesus].” Revelations 13:8 NIV Pretty much the whole thing

Schopenhauer talks of free will and moral responsibility thusly:

“Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. … But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns….”

So what is one to make of all this? Christians, today tell me that I have free will and it is by my own choice whether I go to heaven or hell. But, then you read Revelations 13:8 (above). Of course this is just one of MANY inconsistencies to be found in that confounding book; the Bible.

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