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
When someone tells you who they are believe them
"So what you're saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you're not a murdering rapist pedophile?"
Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?
Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths...
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.
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.
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.
The sad thing is, all of the nuance aside, the answer is very simple.
If there is a good place, the good people will go there. If there is a bad place, the bad people will go there. If there is no place, we all will go there.
Even a child can understand, right?
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.
'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.
Yeah it does, it's Mr Hankey!
Fucking hell
Proof it's getting hot in here
I remember a YouTuber explained that since watches work and had a maker, that humans are immensely more complex, so that's evidence of a maker of the human.
Don't get me started on how badly crafted the human body is. If someone designed us, they should be dragged out in the street and shot.
Why can't I breathe out of my nose ever? Why does food go down the same hole as air? Why do I have to sleep? Why did I have to get boners in Mrs. O's second hour Spanish class right before the end of class and have to walk to lunch at half mast for the whole second semester sophomore year?
The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Our liquid waste evacuation tubes sharing space with our reproductive organs. Our reproductive organs being immediately adjacent to our solid waste evacuation tube. Hangnails. Acne. Teeth (god damn luxury bones).
But my go to for "if there is a god, they're not worth worshipping" is always Children's. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.
Add scurvy to that list, since primates lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C endogenously, while other animals kept it.
Don't get me started on the sick fuck that put my g spot up my asshole
Because Mrs O has a great ass.
Perhaps, SatansMaggotyCumFart. Perhaps.
Without knowing the constraints I'm going to have to withhold judgment.
Unless God is omnipotent cause if so he really sucks at this.
Phones are more complex than watches. Phones are made by Jesus confirmed.
JC Mobile - Unlimited Data, Eternal Life.
That's Paley's Teleological argument from the 18th century. It's a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.
The modern day spin on it is the "fine tuning" argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it's a better argument nonetheless.
Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can't find them, they're too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.
rare enough and spread out enough (both in time and space) that we may never encounter another 'intelligent' civilization, or evidence of one, during our own extremely minuscule window of existence in the grand history of time.
Pascal's Wager
My friend once told me he had heard this very convincing argument on why he should believe...
I told him the usual "gimme your wallet, I'm your god or whatever", and he relented that maybe it's not so simple.
Then a few years later, there he goes bringing it up again...
Holy shit that’s a good rebuttal.
"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.
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.
All of them.
They're all stupid.
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.
The weirdest to me are variations of, "If God didn't exist it would make me feel bad." Uhh???
"It's not a cult." Wake up Karen, it's a cult.
Weirdest would have to be that miracles were actively occuring at their Penacostal church. On the one hand, if that were true it would be strong evidence for a god. On the other hand, I don't believe the claim is true.
A lot of believers point towards the fine-tuning argument. It's "the god of the gaps." Essentially, the argument boils down to the claim that since we don't know why various laws and properties of nature and physics are the way they are, there must of have been a god that set them. Like many theist arguments, it falls apart when you consider that the lack of an alternate explanation doesn't mean that there is no alternate explanation and that the believing explanation has to be correct.
As an atheist, I think the strongest argument for god is the moral argument. It's simple. For objective morality to exist, there must be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-moral being capable of establishing it (that is, a god). Objective morality exists, so God exists.
It's easy to look at that and say "Well, objective morality doesn't exist. End of story!" I think there is a decent argument that can be made for the existence of objective morality, though I don't believe in it. Still, do I not believe in god because I think objective morality doesn't exist, or do I think objective morality doesn't exist because I don't believe in god? If I'm being honest, it's more the latter than the former, and that's not really a great way to come to the conclusion.
Objective morality doesn't exist. Even if it did that doesn't necessitate a God. Let's use colors for a stand-in to morality, now you have two colorblind people arguing whether objective color truly exist, one might say that his holy book says that God gave colors and an apple is red, while the other might say that there's no God and apples are green. They're both (at least about the color part) right (or wrong depending on how you want to look at it), and objective color still exists regardless of it without the need for any God to have created it. In the same way it's possible for objective morality to exist without the requirement of a creator, if it is objective it should be demonstrably so, otherwise it's subjective. In our color example the colorblind people can argue all they want, but if you use an equipment to measure the light waves you'll have an objective answer for the wavelength of the apple, they might disagree on what that wavelength is (the subjective part) but they agree on the value (the objective part). If something similar could be achieved for morality it would imply the existence of an objective morality (regardless of God) but since we can't then no objective morality exists.
A basis for morality just naturally follows from the nature of being a living organism.
Mountains exist.
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.
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
Sounds like someone who's never seen a wild banana.
That's an argument used by Ray Comfort and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron.
"how else would you know the right thing to do?"
queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.
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.
The sun rose today.
Personally, I just prefer it. I get a lot more anxious considering that death is the end, given how it could come at any moment. I prefer to think it's not. Since I was raised with the alternative being that God exists, I go with that.