Originally posted by LightSon
I'd like your perspective on why not believing in God would be better. Of course if true, then that may be enough.
To me, a sincerely belief in God has lifestyle repercussions. Conversely, to reject God or the possibility of His existence, likewise means something w.r.t. how I behave.
I'm afraid you may be working under an incorrect assumption. If you'll read my few postings so far carefully, I think you will find that I have NOT at any point claimed to be an atheist. I have merely pointed out some (unfortunately common) errors in certain arguments advanced by theists.
I am, in fact, NOT an atheist. I consider myself an agnostic. Now, many (on both sides of that position!) consider agnosticism to be merely "atheism without conviction," but that is by no means the sense in which I would use the word to identify myself. Simply put, I do not believe that the question "Is there a God?" to be answerable with certainty EITHER WAY. There is, so far as I can tell, insufficient evidence to conclude that there MUST be a God. But conversely, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - and it remains completely possible that there IS a being worthy of the title. But it is the nature of most definitions of "God" - including any that I've seen proposed here - that the being they describe could never be proven to exist, while it is at the same time impossible to prove that a God CANNOT exist per ANY definition. So I am forced to mark the question as unanswered, and very likely unanswerable.
Having said that, it's also important to note that very, very few of the discussions here ever have to do with "God" in the broad sense. I think that everyone would agree that any God worthy of the title, if one does exist, would be beyond any possibilility of complete comprehension by humans. If that is so, then we can hardly ever have a meaningful discussion about that being - the best that we can hope for is to discuss a particular human-generated image or "model" of God. And I think that quite a good number of those - the majority, perhaps - can be shown to be incorrect, in that they contain sufficient contradictory notions such that the image of God in question could not possibly be correct. Disproving a particular image of God, though, says little or nothing about whether or not ANY God exists, regardless of how attached any one person might be to that particular image.
Perhaps I should put on my atheist hat, and paint a picture of my life without God. I can almost assure you it would not be an altruistic approach to life. Without God, there is no reason for me to do anything but what I choose to do. Would you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I also believe that it is possible to produce a workable "morality" - a code of behavior - that does not rely on the existence of a God as its basis. (In fact, should it be the case that God does NOT exist after all, that IS exactly what mankind has done. But just as we cannot determine the existence or non-existence of God with certainty, we also could not determine the source of our common beliefs of morality with certainty.) That behavior that we call "moral" or "civilized" tends to line up with what happens when an individual moves from purely self-centered behavior to an understanding that behaviors NOT in one's immediate self-interest will often be better for the family/community/society as a whole. That realization clearly does not depend on a belief in any particular God; people have, for example, been sacrificing themselves for family, homeland, etc., completely independently of their particular religious beliefs. And, if I might run the risk of immodesty here, I would like to think that I behave in a manner generally seen as "good" - but clearly, I do so without the same sort of religious beliefs as others hold. It is also clear that this I can't claim any sort of uniqueness in this - there are a very large number of "good" atheists, agnostics, or believers in other faiths, if one is to judge "good" solely on the basis of behavior and in ignorance of these persons' religious beliefs. And there are, also, any number of "bad" people (in terms of their behavior) who hold a very wide range of religious beliefs or non-beliefs. (You might claim that, in the case of the "bad believers", that they couldn't possibly "really" hold the beliefs that the "good" ones do. But there's no way that anyone can truly judge that on behalf of another.)
I am basically a very selfish person. Without the influence of God in my life, any "good"ness you see in me would quickly evaporate.
And I have no doubt that you are giving a sincere and accurate statement here, as far as it goes relative to your particular case. However, I think you have to at least acknowledge the possibility that this might NOT be the case for everyone else. Is it not at least POSSIBLE, in your opinion, that others would find something else on which to base their "goodness"? The Dalai Lama clearly does not believe as you do - is he, therefore, a "bad" person by necessity?
