As I pointed out in my previous comment, the kind of people who would have that conversation with you are not the primary intended audience of the essay above.

While I understand your sentiments, and Volly’s, and definitely see the value of that approach when dealing with fundamentalists, I am bothered that so many who count themselves as atheists or agnostics or secular humanists or skeptics or whatever try to use the same approach when dealing with religious people who are not fundamentalists.

The problem with religion is not that it exists—what do I care if people want to believe in God?—but that it gives aid and comfort to supernatural beliefs that allow people to claim morality while ignoring the consequences of their actions. But there is no way in which belief in God requires the limitation of morality to what is supernaturally revealed or derived. So when you go after non-fundamentalists with arguments that are designed to obviate the existence of God through the necessity of naturalistic morality, you cut deeper than you need, risking a stronger-willed backlash—as is often manifested in critics of the so-called “New Atheism.” Encouraging the kinder-and-gentler religionists to retrench against alternatives—where they will almost certainly fail to address the lunacy of their fundamentalist cousins—is not helpful to the cause of establishing a more thoughtful and realistic morality.

Me: It sounds like you’d consider it an unfortunate situation if there were no morals.

Xian: Yes. It would be terrible. That’s why we need God to give us our morals.

Me: I agree that it would be a terrible situation if we didn’t have morals. Avoiding that terrible situation is my impetus for having morals. God is irrelevant.

—————

That’s how I usually go about communicating the same idea that you put into a lot more words, Peter.

My essay above is directed primarily to religious people who do not (or may not) truly believe that they are only good because they desire divine rewards or fear divine punishments. But the middle section (the three paragraphs beginning with “First” and ending with the bold, italicized sentence) is secondarily directed to the people who do believe (or claim to believe) they are only good because of the divine carrots and sticks.

Religious people do have different ideas about their beliefs, so challenges and criticism should take that into account. The belief that good behavior is only warranted to obtain divine reward or avoid divine punishment should be attacked for all the reasons that doubters and skeptics have always attacked it.

But when you launch those attacks and find yourself lumped in with the so-called “New Atheists,” who are dismissed by many as having nothing new to say, then it’s time to go after the lukewarm defenders of religion. Even though these kinder-and-gentler (“K&G”) believers and their fundamentalist cousins publicly reject each other as not being “true” believers, the former perpetuate the underlying cultural ideas that keep the soil fertile for the views of the latter to thrive. So long as children in our culture, even children of the K&G practitioners, are taught that their ethics flow from divine mandate, and not from any practical considerations, then the K&G adults will never be adequately equipped to fight the fundamentalist lunatics. The best they will manage is the pathetic retort that the others are not “true” believers because they have distorted or misinterpreted or misunderstood the central text of the religion. Their “criticism” of the fundamentalists will fall on deaf ears because it amounts to little more than internecine theological disputes: Who cares?

In short, not all religious people are delusional. But the ones who aren’t delusional are utterly ineffective against the ones who are. The point of my essay above is to suggest how the non-delusional ones could, without betraying their tradition, fight their dangerous fundamentalist cousins more effectively.

I am still confident that if someone managed to prove that God does not exist, and never existed—even though no one will ever prove that—you would continue to behave in pretty much the same way. Without your reliance on God to tell you how to behave, you would soon, perhaps immediately, discover that there are many, many good reasons apart from divine revelation to behave well.

I fully agree with you. After more than 40 years of belief in God in mainstream Christianity, and quite a few since than, I would say I have changed very little. Yeah, some of the words I use are different now, but all in all I would say I am a better person now than before when I was worshiping God.