Re: The Good & Not Good

Ten to fifteen years ago, I was pretty militant about my atheism. I'm from the south, you see, and so much is related to or about religion, so as an atheist, I thought I had to match the amount of religious expression I saw, with my own expression of non-religion. I think a lot of that was me convincing myself about the views I had.

Growing up with my dad, we did not have any religion in the household. The only time I ever heard my dad talking about religion was when some religious people came to the door on a Saturday asking if we had a church. His response was, I don't believe in that shit, and then he closed the door. We never had any sort of principled discussions about it though. I did go to church some with my friends from the neighborhood. I distinctly remember my dad making me go to church if I told the folks coming around that I wanted to go.

So, I was particularly interested when Chris posted about this topic. He said:

I’m interested in what helps any individual person be good and provides some kind of framework for evaluating their actions. Maybe I can learn from them. Religious or otherwise, equally. I’d like to think I can. I’m not above reading some scripture to help understand the world and myself if it can help me be better.

I've always felt that religion gets special consideration and deference it doesn't deserve. I'm not anti-religious though. I can appreciate do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. I can also appreciate You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Those are great quotes to my mind but I don't think they're great because they're from religious sources. I can read them and decide if they're good or not using my own internal moral intuition. In the same vein, I can read all the awful quotes from the bible, which I won't bore you with here, and decide those are awful and not for me.

If we could somehow remove religion from the world, we'd still have good people being good and bad people being bad. Whatever mechanism people use to pick out the good parts of their holy book and ignore the bad parts is where morality comes from.

I hope Chris, and anyone else looking, finds whatever they're looking for.