Reply #35: ...That assumes that death is a problem..rather than part of the natural cycle of life.

[BrklynLiberal]

http://gregscheckler.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/happy-healthy-wealthy-and-wise-%E2%80%93-morality-without-religion/

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Those of us who are not religious are frequently told that lacking religion we have no basis for being ethical or moral, no way to live the good life. Nothing could be further than the truth. Athiests have many motivations, and one of them is that it’s important to do good today because life is rare and valuable, yours and mine.

In fact if you’re an atheist you’re far less likely to be a criminal than if you’re Christian, you’re far more likely to be highly educated, much more likely to be happy, much more likely to have a high i.q., more likely to be employed, less likely to be divorced, and more likely to advocate nonviolence as a lifestyle.Countries that are primarily secular and that contain fewer religious individuals are more likely to be prosperous, peaceful, and wealthy than highly religious countries. If you’re interested in these trends, see the book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Countries Can Tell Us about Contentment, by sociologist Phil Zuckerman. Yet despite these simple facts, many religious people believe that the only way to be ethical and moral is to join and practice their religion. Thuggishly, most religions clearly state that if you are not a member, then you are damned to eternal torment (what kind of peer pressure is that!?)It could of course be, that athiests being generally more educated than otherwise tend to be more literate and therefore prosperous and wise. It may be that the benefits of athiesm have more to do with literacy than non-belief, in the same way that literacy is a better source of debate than Barro and Mcleary’s assumptions. Nevertheless, it isn’t athiests who think that if you don’t join them, you are evil and doomed to Hell!

So just what do atheists say about Morality and Ethics and how we relate and interact with other people in peaceful, productive ways? We rely on study and evidence. We have strong evidence that morality and ethics are human patterns of behavior, evolved over time, and shared with many other animals. We don’t need to invoke anything supernatural to understand that being good to each other is best. (This is mere logic, the tautology that an action wouldn’t be good and couldn’t be described as good if it weren’t beneficial…) The story is much bigger than logical definitions…

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