Steven_R
Tommy Vercetti Fan Club
- Jul 17, 2013
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You're not human, you are a primate.If you need religion to be good, a promised paradisical afterlife, threat of hell if you're naughty, you're already evil and screwed.
Humanists like myself know being good IS good. But we don't behave good and proper because we think we'll be rewarded after we die. We know we'll be rewarded while we're still alive. Good begets good, evil begets evil. If you're only good because you think you'll be rewarded, you're a horrible example of your faith. Would you be good without the concept of heaven or threat of hell? Are you that mentally unhinged?
History shows us that before the advent of deities, (either in multiple form or singular) humans were so amoral as to be evil. The killing of one another was given no more thought than the killing of a spider. Even after the advent of some religion, mankind was cruel to the point it almost defied description. Whole families and ethnicities were enslaved and/or butchered with no more conscious than simple cattle.
A belief that mankind was good and moral before the coming of the major religions is deliberately blind to the history and truth of our existence.
It is possible that as a species and with the advancements we have made, that if we did not have the moral boundaries taught us by millennia of religion, we'd have reduced ourselves back into the prairies and we'd just be another group of hunter/gatherers.
In essence, without God, we are just another tribe of primates, with all the moral code that they carry with them.
I don't know if you've paid attention to history, but all those same things were around after the invention of religion and were done in the name of religion and by every religion at one time or another.
People suck and are cruel and will lie, cheat, steal, and kill with the slightest of motivations and convince themselves they were in the right because each and every one of us has the ability to delude ourselves and rationalize why we aren't in the wrong. Throwing gods into the mix just adds another layer of rationalization that we use to convince ourselves that we're absolved of culpability.