A few days ago I had an interesting conversation with an old friend. Barbara is a wonderful, intelligent, open minded, and caring person. She not religious, but she hasn't given up the idea of God or Christianity. Over lunch we somehow got on the subject of morals.
About 5 minutes into this conversation I realized she assumed that I was a believer! I had told her several years ago that I was agnostic on the subject of God and was surprised she didn't take that into consideration. I stopped the conversation to ask her if she remembered me telling her that and she waved a hand and said "Yeah, but you're just mad at religion. Deep down inside you really believe."
I smiled. I've been waiting for someone to say this to me for months.
Well, I said, it's true that I rebelled against the religion of my parents. As a result I decided to find God on my own and discovered he didn't exist. If I'm angry, which I admit some anger, it's because my parents and family taught me something they should've investigated. I did the foot work and found the information wanting. In fact, I've progressed in my search and am now a strong atheist because of the lack of evidence for god.
This time she smiled at me. But morals come from being spiritual and you are a very spiritual person. You have to believe morals came from God.
This time I asked her to explain that concept to me. All she could come up with was this feeling that she has. I then proceeded to tell her about the evolution of morals within the framework of ancient human society and why we are good to each other. I also explained that animals that live in groups have proto morals and primates even have higher morals than that. At the end of the conversation she was impressed. She saw that I didn't take being an atheist lightly and that I researched and had good explanations for things she just had feelings for. If she thought anymore about it I couldn't say. I hope she did.
5 comments:
I haven't had any conversations with any of my family members yet. Or a religious person yet. I'm still waiting for it to happen, and I will definitely come here for advice from you. You are so down to earth and it's easy to understand your posts. I think I am going to just stutter and babble when that time comes. Yeah, insecure still. Thanks for your posts, I think I like reading other's posts more than posting myself.
I love it when atheists can give coherent and logical responses to questions theists merely have feelings about. Glad to hear that the conversation was productive. At least she doesn't still believe that you are simply rebelling.
Nice one squirrel. My guess is that she won't be able to help but think about it. Be prepared for questions...:)
tina: The best practice I've found is when the Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door. The beauty of this approach is that if you stutter and stumble, they'll think they've got a live one and will come back again next week so you can practice some more. So nice of them.
Then, once you've honed your skill and nailed down your arguments, they'll stop coming to see you. It's a win/win situation really...:)
Thats hilarious Plonka. I think I might just say, hey, I'm an atheist so see ya!
Christians and believers in general seem to think they have a monopoly on morality. It's all a part of the brainwash/indoctrination thing.
As if, being an atheist, the concept of right and wrong is alien and inconceivable. This may not have been at the root of what your friend meant, but I think a lot of religious people feel this way about non-believers.
This in itself is wrong to think this way. It's immoral to assume that another human being has no morals solely because of different ideological viewpoints. That's what gets wars started.
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