Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

by Greg M. Epstein

“If human beings are left to our own devices and limited to our own wisdom, we will invent whatever model of ‘good character’ seems right at the time. Without God there are no moral absolutes. Without moral absolutes, there is no authentic knowledge of right and wrong.”

My follow-up question to Mohler would be, "Who decides how to define the model of 'good character' in your view?" It's not been handed down in perfect order by God. It's a collection of writings that you must sift through and interpret, and ultimately it is all decided by humans how to define moral code we must live by. The only difference is that you make this outlandish claim that your diety inspired the book you are using to figure all this out.

So in our Humanist community at Harvard, we try to spend a lot less time staging debates between Christian fundamentalists and atheist philosophers, or even lectures and symposia on the evils of “intelligent design,” and more time on adult education seminars where we study subjects like Nonviolent Communication, the technique Marshall Rosenberg has articulated for learning how to speak to others—and to ourselves—more directly and compassionately. Rather than complaining about how much power religion has in today’s society, we want to study how to empower ourselves to respond to all the problems in life—aging, pain, death, and the myriad stresses in between—that make people turn to religion in the first place.

The easy, knee-jerk response when we see harm done to others in the name of religion is to try to hit back with whatever means seems most punitive to us. Whether it be an essay on the the evils of a certain theological teaching or a insult-laced Twitter rant, none of this results in what we really want, which is a world where religion doesn't have the dominant hold on the minds of the people, but love and dignity do instead.

As a progressive, one of the first things I want a more powerful and prominent Humanist community to address is those very same “family values” that the religious right has stolen from us. Their distorted wish is to return to their version of an old morality of festering homophobia, obsession with controlling women’s bodies, and harsh, often hypocritical discipline. Let’s steal family values back by actively celebrating our understanding of the diversity of what a family can be and our more welcoming, nurturing approach to life!

Why does the religious right claim an exclusive authority in the arena of "family values"? They do it because they are afraid to allow anyone else to the table, since this would result in the real need to consider other viewpoints. This is not something they have ever done before and they give no indication that they will start trying anytime soon.