So says a fundie.
They say the damnedest things, don't they? But let's take a look at this idea, shall we?
For starters, I'm an atheist. I do not believe that any god exists. I have yet to see proof of such. Because I don't believe that God exists, I don't believe in right and wrong. Murder, rape, theft, and eating babies are just fine by me. It's OK in the animal kingdom, so it's OK for people too. Right?
Of course not.
The reality is that I actually do have a concept of right and wrong. Fundies would say that I do because God gave me one. Wrote it on my heart or some nonsense. And because I have a sense of right and wrong, I know that God exists. Sounds a bit like circular reasoning to me. I'm not buying it. If you bought it, I suggest you take it back. According to some of the things I read in the Bible, this God makes folks like Hitler and Stalin look like amateurs. Why anyone would agree that they are made in his image is beyond me. I'll get to those things in the Bible later. Let's talk about where right and wrong really comes from.
I'm going to focus on the big wrongs, things that are usually touted as absolutely wrong. Murder, rape, theft, and deceit. Seems like every time I get in an argument about morality with a fundie the question of one of those always comes up.
"Is Murder wrong?"
"ummmm, yeah!"
"Absolutely wrong?"
"I think most people will agree that murder is wrong."
"So you do believe in absolutes!"
Yeah and it just goes from there. So why is murder wrong? Animals kill members of their own species and humans are animals, right? Yes, humans are animals, but we are an animal that understands that murder is not conductive to the survival of our species. It doesn't really fit in to how humans organise themselves into societies. Same goes for those other wrongs - rape, theft, and deceit. Throughout thousands of years of human evolution, these concepts have become part of our nature. We need to be told murder is wrong about as much as we need to be told to hold our breath when our heads are underwater.
There's a bit more though. Weird thing about humans, we can feel what it's like, to an extent, to be another human. We can project our feelings on to another of our kind. We can understand the feelings of another of our kind. Those things being said, if I, as a human, understand that something is harmful to me, then I understand that it is harmful to another of my kind. I wouldn't want anything harmful done to me, therefore I shouldn't do harmful things to others of my kind. Harmful things tend not to be good for survival. If an animal understands anything, it understands what it needs for it and it's species to survive. Our needs as humans are a little different from what other animals need so we tend not to do exactly as the animals do. This is why we don't eat our babies. This is why males of our kind do not regularly gang rape females of our kind.
It is nature, our nature as human beings, that dictates right and wrong, not the nature of how other animals behave. God does not make right and wrong. We do.
And if you are still looking to God for your moral absolutes, maybe you can learn a thing to a few from this video -
So what say you? Did you really need the Bible to know that murder is bad, or did it just make sense without you being told anything about it?
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