"Why Believe in God" ad campaign

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by David E

Did you ever stop to think where your values come from? Most non-religious people will say something like "from my heart", "what I feel is right" or "from my concience". What they are not thinking about is that morality is learned, and that their sense of right and wrong has been formed by a culture whose values come from organized religion, a fact of history whether they are conscious of it or not. This has worked pretty well in modern times, with predictable results, as the major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism all share basic rules.

Just because organize religion has been the source in the past does not mean it's the only possibility. We have, for instance, a pretty damned good set of laws in the US that do not rely on belief in God. Whether they were inspired by religious beliefs to begins with is irrelevant as to whether belief in God is a necessity for goodness.

The framers of the Constitution, while obviously influenced by religious belief because that was their background, made a conscious decision to leave god out of the Constitution. They instead created a set of guidelines that did not require belief in their, or any, god to make sense. It all boiled down to, essentially, "freedom and morality ends where your actions affect other people."

I was raised in a culturally religious environment in that I learned about my religion (Judaism) and participated in the traditions. However, my parents are not strongly religious people and their interest in it for themselves, and their children, was pretty much only to the extent that it was a tried-and-true, convenient shortcut for instilling a sense of community. They never relied on it as the arbiter of morality, and as long as I can remember, my sense of morality was, "Be good because it's the right thing to do," not "be good because god said so."