Life without God

I don't see why not.I can listen to music for the sake of listening music, can't I? (It would be strange to do so for any other reason.) And I can do so on the basis that I have a preference for (let us say) the Goldberg Variations over (for example) the "songs" of whales, without having to believe that there is some supernatural being with a preference for Bach over Megaptera novaeangliae (or possibly vice versa); and while accepting that a humpback whale would disagree with my judgment.Now just as I prefer noises that appeal to my aesthetic sensibility, I prefer situations which appeal to my ethical sensibility. A lion will kill another lion, steal his harem, and eat their cubs to make way for his own; he does so apparently without feeling shame (nor incurring blame from the lionesses). I find that to emulate the lion is not to my taste; I do not need to add to this the proposition that it is not to God's taste. I abstain from doing so solely for the sake of not doing so, because it is amongst the things that I don't want to do.

The traditional methods include voting and fighting.

Only in the sense that the "goodness" of music is does not stand alone as an objective aspect of the universe in the way that (for example) the valence of oxygen does, but rather in relation to someone's judgment. (And you yourself only say that it is so in relation to God's judgment --- it is apparently hard to conceive of good or evil without conceiving of someone who believes things to be good or evil.) Because I don't want him to. (And I don't see how the theist's answer of "because my imaginary friend doesn't want him to" is really superior, because of course the pedophile is free to reply that his imaginary friend is totally cool with pedophilia. It is surprising how few theists live in the apprehension that they personally might actually be damned. To misquote Sartre: L'enfer, c'est pour les autres.)Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes, well, in practice "we" haven't been much good at that, have we? When the Protestant said to the Catholic: "God wants me to burn you alive", and the Catholic replied: "No, God wants me to burn you alive", they had both done their best to compare their views to absolute morality, and yet come to contrary results.Perhaps God, who is supposedly omnipotent, could have made himself a little clearer, so that we'd know who, if anyone, he wants us to burn.Unless and until that happens, we are left with a bunch of our own subjective opinions. Apparently the main moral difference between me and a theist is that I know that and he doesn't.

In reality, there is a difference, which is that I would rather mow the lawn. That I possess preferences, and what they are, is every bit an objective fact as the nature of God's preferences would be assuming that he existed and had any.What you mean by "absolute" is obscure. If there is any sense in which God's opinions would be "absolute", and mine are ... what? "non-absolute"? ... then you have yet to explain it. How do we tell the difference? If God and I both believed, for example, that "thou shalt not kill", how would this be an absolute opinion when he holds it but non-absolute when I hold it?

Well, suffering is bad. This includes suffering caused by those forces such as famine, disease, and predation which exert selective pressure.Of course, some of the final results (such as myself) are gratifying, but this does not reconcile one to the suffering qua suffering. (By analogy, I'm glad that I was born but regret the pain this caused my mother.)You must remember that unlike you no atheist is obliged to worship the forces that brought him into being, nor even approve of them. Nor, of course, does he have to approve of their other productions --- I don't have to pretend that the bubonic plague or the tapeworm are the product of wisdom and benevolence; I can concede that nature is often blind, cruel, and stupid.Your own take on this suffering would be rather more interesting.

And this would also have been contended just as vigorously by your co-religionists when they set fire to you for being a heretic. Well, there's that "absolute" of yours again. What do you mean by it? If by "absolute morality" you just mean "that moral system which is preferred by God over all other conceivable moral systems", then it is trivially true that an atheist does not believe in absolute morality, and that at least one supernatural being, namely God, is necessary for there to be "absolute morality". (Just as if you used "absolute bicycle" to mean "God's favorite bicycle".)If you mean something else by it, then this is not so clear. But the same would seem to apply in your system: one arrangement of atoms, or indeed of supernatural entities such as souls and angels and demons, is not intrinsically more valuable than another --- rather you seem to suppose that this value is in the mind of God, and if you took him away, while leaving everything else the same, no value would remain. The moral value of (for example) me hitting you over the head with a brick is (according to you, if I have understood you correctly) not inherent or intrinsic to that situation in itself, but rather depends on whether there is a God and if so what he thinks of it.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I believe I've met some of the fruits of the goof tree ...Seriously, though, they'd have said just the same thing about you. Then they'd have pointed out that you had borne the bitter and abominable fruit of heresy. Then they'd have referred to Jesus cursing the fig tree, then they'd have moved on to the usual passages justifying the burning of heretics, then they'd have set fire to you.One wishes that Jesus had left more detailed instructions. Oh, well, in that case my morality is as "absolute" as God's. I think you're just misusing the word "intrinsic". If the same arrangement of atoms (me hitting you with a brick) can have a different moral value depending on whether or not there's a God, external to that situation, in whose image we're made, then that is not intrinsic value.(A good analogy might be two identical pens, one of which is much more valuable because Madison used it to write the Bill of Rights with. They have the same intrinsic value; but one of them has greater extrinsic, historical, or sentimental value.) That would be a "yes". There is nothing inconsistent with my disbelieving in God and possessing moral preferences and acting on them --- any more than it is inconsistent to be an atheist, to have preferences as to what color I should paint my bathroom, and act on those. I do not need to add to my own feelings the idea that somewhere there is a supernatural being who also has preferences as to what color my bathroom should be --- preferences which might differ from mine just as well as agree with them.