Joshua Roberts

Do People Become Atheists so They Can Act Immorally?

There are probably some people who do, but largely no, in fact most atheists start out religious because that’s how they were indoctrinated and gradually come to openly oppose religion after conducting analysis. In my own life I have spent nearly a decade making a comparative study of world religions, from the Elder Eddas to the Eleusinian Mysteries, I love the perspective of religion as astro-theology when it comes to judeo-christianity but the same thing applies to many other systems. Many of the earliest metaphysical systems that we might call pagan religions are closer almost to a quantum view of nature, in that they posit that there are “gods in all things” etc.

The problem here is that without morality one must stand on ethics, which is sufficient, but requires Other People to hold a person to a standard. Deity is more effective because it uses the Threat of repercussions after death (about which we have no experience and therefore it is terrifying) or within this own life via an omnipotent and omnipresent mind. We mustn’t forget however that morality is a perspective informed by a set of values which are human, they are not divine, and they are codified by humans. Thus the two approaches are identical! It is just that with the moralistic one there is an injected fear of divine reprisal to sweeten the pot and keep people from doing ill to one another or acting unjustly. But isn’t this also the source of a greater volatility within the morality system? All too often we have evidence of god being used as the justification for bloodshed!

I prefer ethics, without a concept of the divine, governed by a culture (which, as plato reminds us, is a difficult thing to produce and should be our primary concern) a culture which rigorously pursues the concept of justice.