Michael Nugent with the nineteenth in a series of pieces on whether gods exist.
How can we judge morality if gods exist? This is the nineteenth of a series of short posts about whether gods exist and why the question is an important one.
In any given circumstance, it is already hard enough to understand and figure out the best balance between the requirements of empathy, compassion, cooperation, reciprocity, fairness and justice.
In any given circumstance, it is already hard enough to understand and figure out the best balance between the requirements of empathy, compassion, cooperation, reciprocity, fairness and justice.
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| Photo: Westerlund 1 star cluster from NASA & ESA/Hubble |
And so you see Verse 24:2 of the Quran saying: flog adulterers 100 times each, and do not let your compassion stop you. Because clearly some early Muslims knew that this punishment was disproportionate and immoral, and so they had to be specifically told to not let their compassion stop them.
And you see Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel in the Bible, where the Christian God repeatedly commands the Israelites to attack the cities of other tribes, to show them no compassion, and to completely destroy them, putting to death man woman child and infant, and leaving nothing alive that breathes.
Otherwise good people defend these acts of injustice because of their religious beliefs, on the grounds that it is good because a god commanded it, even though it would have been bad if the god had not commanded it, including defending the slaughter of infants and children on the basis that they would have gone straight to heaven.
Not only is belief in a god not needed for objective morality, but belief in a god can corrupt our rational search for that objective morality.
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| Michael Nugent is Chair of Atheist Ireland |
Why would a God who created everything give a solitary fuck what the hairless gibbering monkey's are doing, and why would they fret over the morality of it's creation? An indifferent God is much more likely.
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