RELIGION ABSURDLY AND DESPERATELY TRIES TO MAKE GOD AND MORALITY MEAN THE SAME THING!

Is morality made by God or not? It is either one or the other.  If morality is true then it does not need a God for it to be true.  It is just its nature to be correct.  It is a brute fact.  Religion says that our dilemma is not one or the other.  It says that the answer is that morality is God's nature.  Morality is what God is and God is what morality is.  This is not an answer for nobody can explain it or understand it.  It is the same as saying your maths teacher somehow is algebra.  It is saying that it is just morality's nature to be true and valid.  If that is the case what you do need God for?

Also God's nature might be morality but how does he know?  You can be a human being in some kind of jar and never know what it is like.  So if God does not know, then we are back to where we started.  He will either have to follow morality or try to make it by commanding it.

So the reach to make God validate morality seems futile and misleading.
 
It is said that the naturalist or non-theist faces a similar problem. Are moral values good because the naturalists or non-theists say so or are they good because of some objective standard?
 
But no naturalist or non-theist claims that something is good just because they want it to be or say it is. They think there is an independent standard. And so there is. 1 + 1 = 2 even if there is nothing at all and no God. Morality at best is working out what causes the least pain. Will action x lead to pain on a scale of 10 or 20? Maths is the ground of ethics or morality.
 
And it is more honest of the naturalist or non-theist to argue, "X is good and doing other than X is bad because I say so," than to blame God for saying it.
 
Is good good because people command it or is it good in itself? That is what should be asked. Not, "Is good good because God commands it or is it good in itself?" It is manipulative to ask the second instead of the first. Why? Because we are only told about God by people who claim to be speaking with his authority. It is really what they say about God that we trust not God. We cannot truly trust God when our knowledge of him is second-hand and hearsay. To ask the second instead of the first is trying to stop people from realising that man tells them what to believe about God. It is hoped that by putting the focus on the alleged divine origin of right and wrong that we will end up considering blind obedience to God. To ask the first question encourages people to think critically about human morality and laws. The second question is about stifling criticism and the first is about encouraging it in a constructive way.
 
Let us assume we need to believe in morality. The dilemma about good being a command or real implies that bringing God in only makes the problem worse. Bringing God in would be immoral. Leaving him out of the dilemma, means that if the problem is bad then morality is a necessary evil. It would not be immoral but a necessary evil because we have no alternative.
 
To say that it does not matter if I do good or bad for there is no accountability before God implies that if I do good I should just do it because I will have to answer for it to God and won’t want to be punished by him. It really suggests that good is just a fiction, a chimera and an illusion. It is good in itself to feed a starving dog regardless of God or eternal life. What does it say about a person that they would have a problem with that?
 
The virtues of compassion and courage are useful here in earth but not in Heaven where suffering and vulnerability cease and there is only happiness. Some may argue that there is no point in having the virtues if they are no good in Heaven. The Catholic answer is that the virtues are good in themselves. They say that the virtues are not used in Heaven but the saints still have them. They say that Mother Teresa would be good even if she were on a planet where there was nobody to help. She was simply good. Translation: being good is what matters not doing good. Society will not agree with that so why is the Catholic faith such a force in society?
 
Catholics believe that God is not in the business of making people happier and enhancing their pleasure but is more concerned that they use their free will correctly and become good people. Again, society will not agree with that so why is the Catholic faith such a force in society?

Christians say God didn’t make us to be happy but to have joy. Does that make sense? It does if you understand happiness as wellbeing and joy as something you experience when you are very very far from well. If you had a lot of joy you would count as a happy person. So the Christians mean that God does not want you to feel good much but allows it occasionally! If we often have to sacrifice happiness that does not mean we are not here to be happy. It only means that sometimes happiness is a block to bringing about more happiness. You may have to confine yourself to the house and miss a lot of parties and become unhappy in order to study and gain the greater happiness and benefit of passing your exams.
 
The idea that we need to believe in God to be happy is heretical because God sometimes intends that people suffer depression and so on. Those who are happy are to have the attitude, "I accept happiness because God gives it to me and not because I like being happy. My motive is all about him." That is a very negative way to approach happiness. The idea that there is no real happiness without faith in God accuses the happy people who don’t believe or who don’t care if God exists or not of being frauds and of being a bad and harmful influence in society. If you follow God to be happy and not for his own sake then it is happiness you love and not him. Following God properly will be very stressful and difficult. It is hard to want to love God. And Jesus made it harder by saying you must love God in all that you do and with all your heart meaning emotions. He did say you can love your neighbour as yourself but he did not imply that self-love is allowed.  Tne command is not, "Love your neighbour and yourself as well."  And note that he said loving your neighbour as yourself is God's commandment meaning you must do it not for the sake of your neighbour but for God! That is not heartfelt love. Jesus did not command that we feel love for our neighbour - in fact he said we should not for we must love God with all and not most of our heart.
 
If you suffer great evil on earth, God cannot make it up to you ever! The evil still happened. He cannot make it up to you in moral terms or any other terms. So why should it matter to you if there is a good or moral God?  Compensation is not making up but trying to do the impossible.  It admits remorse for the bad things that happened to you.  The compensation thing is very big and is what people primarily mean when they say God lets innocents suffer only because he can turn it to good.  That is not a good look.  It suggests you want to tell yourself that hurting others is okay for they will get a reward for enduring it some day.
 
Suppose I steal. Why is this wrong? It may just be bad. Or it may be bad because God forbids stealing. If it is just bad, then it is bad whether there is a God or not. If something is bad, that does not mean that God has the authority to forbid it. If stealing is bad because God says so then it follows that it is not the stealing that is bad but the disobeying of God. That actually shows that if there are moral people among the devotees of God it is in spite of their faith and not because of it. God cannot have the authority to ban stealing because we need to see for ourselves that it is bad regardless of who forbids it. Surely the state has the authority to forbid us to kill? That is different for the state is about control and has to be in a dog eat dog world.
 
When a claim is very strange and out of the ordinary and/or very important, you need a lot of evidence or at least high quality evidence before you can accept it. That is if you are a self-respecting individual and if you are not self-respecting you will be a danger to others. Suppose as religion says, you cannot believe that morality is real unless you believe in God. You would need the evidence for God to be overwhelming if you need to believe in God in order to justify saying that immorality is objectively real and factual. But it isn't ...
 
Let us rephrase that. If moral principles are facts, and they are not facts unless God is a fact, then you need to prove God is a fact. You need the same degree of evidence that God exists as that you have the sense of touch. But we cannot know even if God exists that he is a fact.
 
Religion is merely setting morality up for collapse! Its record shows it is capable of that! Many would say it is to blame for the dictatorship of relativism that we have now.
 
Even if we do think morality or the right and wrong principles is or are ultimately useless, we still need to practice it or them and we want to. If a painkiller stops a toothache for seven seconds it is ultimately useless but we might still take the painkiller. It is what is immediately useful that matters more than what is ultimately useful. So ultimate usefulness or uselessness is not a relevant concern.  

Morality is about rules that are enforced by law. Morality is a law. Rules that are said to be about helping to make you happy, are really saying you cannot be trusted to make yourself happy and so you need to be kept in check. The rules are not rules unless God or the Church or society is going to admonish you and make you suffer should you flout them. This principle is one of the reasons why even if religion seems easygoing, we should see that in principle it wants to take away our freedom. Why do we need rules? Why not suggestions? It is better to do the right thing because of a suggestion than a rule! Doing good should be spontaneous.
 
It is said that if atheism is true, then it ultimately does not matter if we are good or not. In other words, we will all be dead and then any good we have done will be useless. This contradicts the idea that good is just good in itself. As we have seen, Catholicism says that though the virtues or many of them are no good in Heaven, what matters is that we will be good if we go there.
 
Good exists. We know it's good to be happy. Morality is about doing the greatest good. Not everybody believes in morality but they believe in good. They believe good exists but that nobody can really be sure what the greatest good is for our actions all have consequences that we cannot control. Thus they insist that we must be humble and instead of thinking we are good we must say we have tried our best. Religion does not have this humility. It claims to know what is right and what is wrong clearly. And it distinguishes between "good" people and "bad".
 
The wrong we do is none of God’s business. The priesthood knows that well enough for it is the chief argument today defended by those who wish to live their lives as they see fit. The principle is the reason why so many Catholics for example ignore the teaching of the Church.
 
The Church targets and attracts the vulnerable and the uneducated and the thoughtless. The lies surrounding God and morality show that Christianity is manipulative. Manipulative means having a hidden agenda and not telling the whole story. The faith even when it is not expressed in extremist terms is an open invitation to extremism.