God implies Morality
About Power not Love
Morality is for the neglected and the vulnerable more than for the good. You are neither neglected or vulnerable no matter how it looks if there is a God handling your life. Any sense of being on your own would be a delusion. God is not neglected or vulnerable either so offering him love and justice is strange. God then and morality are not really connected at all. In fact one is against the other. God is about power.
God has the power to make possible things from nothing. So he is all-powerful. He can make running water but he cannot make a running water that is custard. The latter would not be thing or possible so it implies no limit on his power. In fact he would not be truly all-powerful if he could make contradictions true. Liberty means not freedom from everything but freedom in a way that makes sense.
Hypothetically, if God is infinitely powerful or omnipotent then if he is not morally perfect then he can be. He has the power to make himself perfectly good and be perfect love. So then we can assume he has done that. But notice what really matters here - the power! The love loses its shine when it depends totally on his power!
God being all-powerful and being able to do the logically possible is the most important. Believers are fools if they say it is his love that matters not his power for love is a power. God cannot love unless he is about power. A God who has the power to love but does not have the power to act on that love is keeping it to himself. What use is that?
Some forms of religion claim that as God is perfect
goodness, he comes first and everything we do must primarily be done for the
love of him. If you love your neighbour as yourself, according to many then it
is PRIMARILY because God commands it. In fact as God deserves all our love and
makes all creatures meaning no creature matters in comparison to him then it
should be ONLY because God commands it. In so far as you love obedience you do
not love your neighbour. It is a sneaky way of telling you to love your
neighbour but only a bit.
Christianity teaches that we are to love God as Lord with all our hearts and
powers meaning our only motive in doing whatever we do is to obey him. If you
love your neighbour as yourself, it is solely because God commands it. So you
really love God and not your neighbour. You love obedience to him rather than
the neighbour.
With those thoughts in mind, it is outrageous how anybody can seriously say that
you need to believe in God to be moral or good!
Religion says you cannot possibly ever be a consistent moral sceptic. Believers
say that those who say, "There is no such thing as morality. I don't believe in
it. It is wrong to believe in it" are making a morality out of regarding
morality as immoral. They say we cannot get away from making a moral judgment.
They are right. Yet they are eager to claim that atheists then cannot believe in
morality. They lie to smear atheists and make atheism feared. They lie that
morality and God go together which implies the less you are convinced that God
exists the closer you are to abandoning morality. This is about using God to get
power over people.
Those who say that atheists can be good but they cannot rationally believe in
being good are fogging. You cannot really be good in your heart unless you
believe in goodness. Even if atheists could really be good - this is
hypothetical for they cannot be if those people are right - they are guilty of
undermining belief in morality. The good they do makes others admire them and
sucks them into this undermining. So it is not good but merely looks and acts
good. If your mind and heart undermine morality then if you do good then that is
attributable to luck and chance and not you.
God is important to believers as the alleged being who is pure love and on your
side. If you cosy up to an entity who has great power you will feel power
for you decide to accept his decisions and make them your own as well. To
feel powerful it does not follow that you need to have vast power yourself.
People who seek absolute power are corrupt. And getting the power or thinking
they have it corrupts them more. But in reality there is no absolute power
unless you have power over reality and truth to shape them according to your
will. You have no such power so you make do with the sensation that you do have
it. If you think the God of the universe hears and answers your prayers and is
still working for you even if you seem to get no answer you hope for it being
answered in a surprise way different to what you expected. That is the crave for
power at its most extreme. It explains why religious believers are often nasty
and dangerous. If somebody is nice just because they have a sense of
having absolute power that niceness is a facade. A really good person will
be good whether or not they feel powerful.
GOOD OR MORAL?
Being a good person is not the same as being a moral person.
A moral person is a person who follows the moral law. In other words, there are
rewards for obeying and punishments for breaking the law. A law without a
penalty is hypocrisy not a law and indeed only serves to turn people off
goodness.
To believe in a good God is to say that moral beliefs are defective or totally
groundless if they exclude him. It is saying you are a harmful person if you
don’t give God much time in your life and if you don’t proclaim the rules that
are allegedly from him and if you don’t believe or don’t promote faith in God.
It is to say that the law of God should be the law of the state too because the
state can have no right to dictate what people should do if it is not doing its
best to be ethical. This belief has such a huge potential for people to acquire
power that it is no wonder the state is so fond of the God belief and most
people in general are – or think they are.
It is bad enough to say that right and wrong is corrupted and defective without
God but some go further and say there can be no sincere belief in right and
wrong without God end of story.
Those who say that there is no right and wrong unless there is a God are saying
that there is no morality unless there is a God to invent it. They hate those
who do not believe for they say that they must believe in amorality and are
therefore to be counteracted and discriminated against in jobs and public office
and everything and yet they do the same themselves. Better to be immoral than
amoral because at least then you believe and teach that wrong is wrong. They are
effectively encouraging people with little or no faith in God to be immoral or
to do evil.
In Stephen T Asma's book, Why I am a Buddhist, page 20, 21, we read that he went
to Catholics priests and asked them if God discovered the Ten Commandments or if
he made them up. Are they intrinsically good or right or are they just the
edicts of a powerful divine king? Asma observed that if God researched ethics
and he discovered what is right and good then he reported it back to us as a
messenger. The priests all engaged in a form of evasion, "Pray harder and ask
for grace" (page 21). They had confidence in the power of prayer to distort
one's perception of reality! That Asma felt he needed an answer to the problem
of God and the Ten Commandments shows that his own perception was partly
distorted. If his eyes had been allowed to see properly, he would have seen that
God and morality are separate issues and seen there was nothing to ask the
priests about.
Christians argue that those who do not believe what they believe will go to
suffer in Hell forever. The Catholics do not want to hold that right and wrong
are objectively right and wrong independently of God. The person who thinks they
are independent is considered a sinner and thus will be damned for his unbelief
in God. This is extreme doctrine and riddled with bullyboy mind-game: "Do not
see that morality (or goodness) and God are independent for you will agonise in
Hell for all eternity if you do."
People who believe in the morality that God purportedly invented are evil for
God is at liberty to invent whatever brutal rules he likes and they can pass off
their evil rules as his. It also means accusing people of doing wrong when they
haven’t and enslaving them to fantasies. If God is out there then he did not
create good but he just conforms to it. He is under its authority as much as we
are.
There is more chance of a person believing in right and wrong without God
especially when God has to invent the rules.
They often won’t admit it but those who say there is no morality without God are
really saying that there is no morality without belief in God. Their real
attitude is this, that there is no morality without people who create belief in
God so morality really depends on human authority. It is not really about God,
God is only the cheese in the mousetrap. An implication of their attitude is
that it is better to say there is a God even if there is no God and to carry out
pious fraud to get people to believe in him. There would be no need for
immorality with a morality like that!
Even to say people who believe in God are better people than unbelievers or
should tend to be is saying that it is not God that is needed but belief in him
is. There is no point in people being so fussy about getting others and their
children to believe in God unless it is a scam to get them to behave the way
they want to see them behave. It is a scam and you can only build hypocrisy and
not goodness or decency on such a foundation. The God belief is anti-decency.
When somebody does wrong to you maliciously, you want to hurt that person back.
You hate the sinner and the sin. You see that the distinction between sinner and
sin is a distinction without a difference. The sinner is the sin in the sense
that sin shows what kind of person the sinner is. Christianity says you must
hate the sin but love the sinner which really means, "Hate the sinner but
pretend you don't". You feel personal about the sin. You cannot want to hurt a
sin but only a sinner. Some say that loving the sinner and hating the sin is the
whole point of believing in God. They "explain" that he loves all people and
hates their sin and that justifies the idea that revenge is wrong which is a
basic principle of morality. If that is true then if loving the sinner and
hating the sin is impossible then the whole point of believing in God
evaporates. A belief that advocates hatred and lies cant be said to be fruitful
to moralists or even relevant to helping them. What it does is abolish right and
wrong and replace it with the autocracy of religious hypocrisy.
By rising from the dead, Jesus claimed he was giving evidence that God must be
obeyed. Jesus said that if you love him you will keep his commandments. If you
do good because God says so then it follows that doing what you are told is what
matters not the good. The good is just coinciding with your obedience but is not
what is intended.
If we see a baby in pain we will help whether we believe in God or not. We may
believe in God a little and help. Clearly if the belief vanished that would not
stop us. It's a small loss if we just barely believe. We don't need belief in God
to do good. Also, how do we know that God is good? Do we obey God because he
commands us to obey or do we obey because the command is good? We can't do both.
Why? Because if we think God knows what good is and commands it we are not
obeying because it is good but because God believes it is good. So we are really
saying that God invents morality and that there is no such thing as real good or
real evil.
If we obey God because the command is good and not because he commanded it then
we are not really obeying him. Our intention is to do good not to obey. It only
looks like we obey him. God is irrelevant to morality and belief in right and
wrong. It is only relevant to power-driven people who wish to invent right and
wrong in the name of religion.
If we obey God because his commandment is good, we are saying that we would
disobey God if he commanded evil and that he doesn't invent good but has to obey
it himself. To obey because God commands implies that obeying is what is
important to us not goodness. That is not a encouraging attitude. Who wants to
obey for the sake of obeying? Also, we are evil if we don't care about goodness.
The resurrection of Jesus must be dismissed as nonsense for Jesus himself
inferred that if the doctrines the resurrection promotes are false then we are
entitled to disbelieve in the resurrection. Jesus because of his lies, if he
existed, must be regarded as a malign influence.
God believers when asked why God is good and why he should be obeyed would have
to reply that it is because he cares about people. That is what nearly everybody
would want to be true. But it denies that God should be obeyed and loved because
he is good in himself. It denies he should be loved because he is simply good.
To say that God should be loved and obeyed because he is simply good means that
he is to be loved and obeyed because his nature is good. But that implies that
some standard outside God must judge if his nature is good. It follows then that
belief in doing good has nothing at all to do with belief in God.
Jesus specified in a commandment that it is the LORD your
God you must love absolutely. In other words, you have to love God as the one
who has the right to give orders to you and you have to see yourself for the
underling you are. This is a very negative commandment.
Jesus embraced little children saying, "Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me" (Mark 9:37). He is showing that he means welcoming a person in the loose sense. Strictly speaking it is only God that is to be welcomed. That is how the seeming contradiction between loving God alone and loving neighbour is reconciled. He is clear that he does not mean,
"Whoever receives a child does not just receive the child
but receives me too". "Receiveth not me", makes that plain.
Jesus said that we must love God as Lord with all our
potential - not some of it. This is another way of saying that disobeying the
Lord or Boss is the worst sin.
If there is an all-good and all-perfect God, it is automatically true that offending him or disobeying him is the worst evil.
Hurting people is not the worst evil - the disobedience
is the problem.
The believer however religious often does not have the guts to become a paragon of religious evil. Many believers delude themselves and remain good despite embracing evil doctrine.
The God belief is a nuisance in the world. It is a bad
influence for those who think about it but who still won't give it up. If you
like power, you need to invent a God of power to worship. Why? Because getting
power in this world will not necessarily mean you have a sense of being in
control. You know the power could vanish tomorrow.
For the atheist, society's misguided notion about right
and wrong is a necessary evil. It is not something to be celebrated. The
religious believer holds that somehow God is morality or at least that to honour
God is to honour morality. Thus the worship of God is the vile adoration of an
inadequate and social moral construct - it should be tolerated not adored.
Society bullies the person who steps outside the moral boundaries and the fear
of saying how we feel causes so much misery in society. People know they cannot
assert their rights without attracting the attention of the moral bullies. Our
morality leads only to cosmetic peace and acceptance. Nobody who has thought
about the meaning of God can really be a happy bunny in Church. Or a mentally
healthy one for long. Religion thrives for people often fail to see beyond its
public face to the bigger and darker dimension.
* Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch
Publications, East Sussex, 1995
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, SPCK, London , 2008
Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Edited by Michael Martin, Cambridge
University Press, New York, 2007
