Read my Guest Post At Reason Being!

John Richards of the blog Reason Being has published a guest post of mine on his blog. If you remember, he has also been a guest poster here as well, and he was gracious enough to not only write his post, Good Without God for my blog, but he also linked to it on reddit's r/atheism sub forum, bringing me hundreds on new views to the blog.

He really is a great guy, and runs a very well written blog.

Check out my guest post, Looking Back At My Home Schooling Past, and make sure to read more of his posts, he is a great writer.

I do welcome guest posts on my blog, I accept proposed guest post at my blog e-mail account, ramblingsofsheldon@gmail.com.

A few things to keep in mind:

I prefer guest posts from the non-religious, whether you be atheist, agnostic, deist, or even believe in a god, but rejected organized religion.

Proposed guest posts from people more liberal religious groups like liberal Christians, Unitarians, etc, will be accepted on a case by case basis, and will depend on the proposed post and topic.

Proposed guest posts from fundamentalists will be autocratically rejected, as well as spam posts attempting to promote a business, take the spam somewhere else (and yes, I have gotten these spam proposals before).

If you want to mention your blog, and/or your social media pages, that's fine, but if I'm not familiar with you, I will check out those pages, and their content first.

I will contact anyone back who sends in a legitimate guest post proposal, I really enjoy interacting with guest posters, especially fellow bloggers, show me what you can write :)

Good Without God

The other day I had a Christian ask me “How can you be good without god?”  I asked him what he meant by the question.  His response was “Without god, what keeps you from going out on a killing spree?”  To be honest, I get questions of this nature often.  I get them on Twitter daily (@logicalbeing if you’re into that sort of thing).  More surprising to me is when I get them from friends and family.  

 I want to address questions of this nature without getting too much into the larger debate on the source of morality.  The reason I don’t want to discuss the origins of morality or the objective/subjective nature of morality is really quite simple.  I don’t think we need to do so to illustrate that they do not come from any divine being.

If it is belief in god that is supposedly keeping us from going on killing sprees, I think we can assume a few things.  We can assume that the person posing the question believes in the concepts of heaven and hell.  I think it fair to say that the idea of eternal reward and fear of eternal damnation plays a role in their morality.  

I say this because of the way the question is phrased, “how can you be good without god?”  This implies that it is the belief in god that is necessary for morality.  In order to be moral, one must believe that god exists, that this god has decreed what is moral and immoral, and is keeping tabs on what humans are doing.  The last part is important.  If god is not keeping tabs, when why would he be a factor in what a believer does?  If there is no reward or consequence, then what does it matter what god thinks of our actions?