Being Good Without God Has its Own Rewards

I conclude as a humanist, and I’m sure many of you will agree, that empathy isn’t a fault of personality and compassion for others and the planet isn’t a defect in one’s perspective. While the conservative world has gone all in being “alpha,” the reality is that cooperation generally begets peace and stability, while alpha-based ignorance, prejudice and nativism often begets violence and injustice.

Thus, while I understand those who require faith to live a good and moral life, I cannot relate to such a need for the divine or theology, which I still see as an “alpha” perspective that often leads to cruelty—if not flat-out violence. This is why I rarely, if ever, debate believers when it comes to challenging their religious views and values, especially within the context of my non-belief. However, I’m always struck by believers when they make claims related to morality and the need to please and accept God in order to live an ethical and purposeful life.

The argument is usually presented as, “If you don’t believe in god how can you think and act morally?”. As if to say, if you don’t acknowledge that you’re being judged by a divine entity of your own making 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, you will fall into moral collapse and abyss.

From my perspective, the daily attempt to please an unseen divine force seems burdensome and insincere. Living out one’s moral code and actions in fear rather than joy also seems exhausting. An induced self-interest, separating the believer from the material world. All to please the divine first and humanity second. This is not love and kindness; it presents itself more as idiomatic narcissism to gain points and then, secondarily, perhaps to help others.

Still, I have five counters.

The first relies on the Bible itself. God easily destroyed all living things during the great flood, including all humans, without consideration of who he was killing. Don’t you think that there had to be some morally good people aside from Noah and his family? Even children were wiped out—and they’re generally innocents.

So, god just created an orgy of violence and killed everyone, including people who were already following his laws, right? Which means they died alongside all the evil people in one fell swoop. Their goodness was not enough to satisfy a vengeful god, and thus they died regardless of their ability to think and act morally.

The second retort looks at pious people and institutions. Those who put themselves out in the community as religious role models, and who are found to be dubious, or liars, or cheats and generally awful scandalous people. And, of course, there are whole religious institutions who have covered up scandals and have never been held to account for their horrible deeds and actions, whether it be intimidation, slavery, psycho-social violence and even sexual torture.

So really, how can you trust any theology or religious code related to morality when so many members of these sects and every religious tradition is steeped in periods of violence, hatred and ignorance? The list of horrible religious people and their organizations are ever growing and never ending. Any reasonable person should rightly ask, where is god’s injunction?

My third response concerns the audacity and idea of deathbed conversion. Which, to me, is a complete moral lapse offered through theology that essentially reconciles one’s horrible behavior on earth, only to be forgiven for your sins upon conversion in the last minutes of life. Kind of like a Monopoly “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Can you imagine that, given this terrible religious reset, some of the worst purveyors of evil—those who’ve murdered, raped, kidnapped, stole and harmed others on either a micro or macro-level—can just say they accept god and repent and then their evil doesn’t matter anymore? This is a cruel abomination and means all those who are victims never receive acknowledgement or justice.

Fourth, and this is because I am an anthropologist: What if in the end you’ve followed the wrong moral code and you don’t get the payoff you wanted? The main reason people practice the faith they do is because they were born into a family, community and region of the world that practices that particular faith.

According to religious studies, most people stay within their birth religion (some nearly 90%) their whole lives. So it seems that if you practice your birth faith, you’re bound to stay within its moral lanes even if it opposes other sects in the same religion or other religious traditions entirely.

What if in this crazy cosmos, and Pascal’s Wager be damned, you find out way too late that the Abrahamic tradition and moral teachings you hold dear are each way off? And all along you should have been following a different faith and philosophy, or none at all? Or perhaps you missed the correct faith train entirely and should have been following the traditions, rituals and rites of Bantu African Ubuntu or Indigenous Lakota Wocekiye or Chinese Taoism after all?

Where then was god to guide you towards the correct faith practice? Essentially, the royal flush you thought you were holding turns out to be just a pair of deuces.

Finally, and on a positive note, my barometer of interest in harming others, to commit violence or to act in an evil manner is set to zero. Because, like so many people, religious or not, I don’t want to commit such violence, ever. It’s the golden rule held in my genes and learned through experience and sympathetic acknowledgment that we owe it to ourselves to act humanely towards each other and the planet. All for the greater good and for the good fortune of future generations that we will never meet.

In fact, I would make the argument that being good without god is more liberating and satisfying than fearing retribution from a divine master because of any real or imagined missteps.

Certainly, as humanists, our ethics and moral code comes from our internal empathy. Culturally understanding and accepting the tenets of humanism provides us with both a moral and ethical foundation to offer further guidance throughout our lives. In truth, though, if you want either the humanist or alpha-male payoff, probably the best moral teaching comes from a single Beatles lyric from the “Abbey Road” album in 1969: “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”