Can an Atheist be a good person?
When I used to debate atheists, they would ask "Can an atheist be a good person?"
They expected me to say "Yes".
If I said "yes" they could say "What's the point of being Christian, if I can be good anyway?"
If I said "no", they could peg me as a fool.
Questions deserve honest answers. Before I can answer I've got to see what the question means.
What does an atheist mean by a "good person"?
I googled around and saw two atheist answers.
- 1) A person who does more good deeds than bad deeds.
2) A person who has empathy and compassion towards others.
The second answer is closer to a Christian concept of good. An atheist can have empathy for others and do good deeds out of that feeling. Now why do people have empathy and act on it?
People have empathy and act on it because it makes them feel better about themselves. It makes them feel needed or compensates for guilt about bad things they've done. You also get praise and affection from others. At the worst it makes you think you're better than someone else.
Empathy can be motivated by selfishness just as much as doing good deeds.
So what does a Christian think makes you a good person?
Christians believe we are self-centered and cannot escape that. Everything we do is motivated deep within by selfish reasons. In short you can never make yourself a good person. You'll never be doing good for its own sake. You'll always be doing good for some personal benefit.
The atheist might say "So what. Why does it matter why I do good?"
It's as if I paid my wife to love me. If she only loves me because I pay her, does she really love me or does she really love the money? If you're only good for the benefits, you aren't really good inside.
Christianity is more concerned with destroying the evil inside you than with good deeds or bad deeds. Buddhists believe we can escape our self-centeredness. However no one would ever try except for selfish reasons. We're so stuck in ourselves we can't escape.
Christians believe Jesus makes you good by reaching down and pulling you up out of selfishness. This changes your nature and your motivations. Living a selfish life left you with bad habits. The Christian life is about going back to Christ and letting him lift you up when you fall back into selfishness. The Christian can't be a good person. The Christian can only surrender his will and let Jesus lift him back up.
10 comments:
that post made sense. Glad I stopped by.
The atheist response is that what you've described cannot be considered unselfish, because you are still doing it to get a hoped-for benefit: getting into heaven, avoiding being subject to "god's judgment" the way you think non-believers will be, etc. Even under your sectarian redefinition of the word "good," Christians fare no better than anyone else. If any hint of self-interest destroys good, then Christians would seem to deny the existence of human good, period. And in fact, that is just what they do: "And Jesus said to him: why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." -Mark 10:18
Then they accuse atheists of being pessimists and write books marveling that todays youth think of Christians as arrogant and hypocritical.
In summary, the answer is that no one is truly a good person since everything we do is selfish, even if it comes out of empathy, because empathy is selfish, too.
And this just turns me off to Christianity more.
Citizen, people don't make themselves Christians (according to the Bible).
Christ reaches down and grabs us out of a pit of selfishness that we desperately want to stay in. I had nothing to do with my being a Christian. I can't take credit for it and I can't feel superior because of it.
I'm not sure I buy this. I have to think awhile about it. I was an atheist before I became a Christian and I was a good person. It was just who I was; not because I was trying to be out of selfish reasons. After I became a Christian I didn't become better for a long time, but I did change some inside eventually and guess I became even better....LOL.
Thanks for replying, SEG.
If that is what Christians believe, then
you must think your god wants me to be an atheist, otherwise I would have been "raised up by Jesus" already. If you think that, then you must also think that I'm doing what your god wants me to do by not believing, and isn't "doing what god wants" the definition of "Christian morality"? Wouldn't that make me, as an atheist, a "good person" by Christian standards?
It seems you've refuted yourself.
Moreover, if people don't make themselves Christians, then Jesus is responsible for sending all the people who he didn't make Christians to eternal suffering for the sin of unbelief. All that suffering, for people who, you think, couldn't help being who they were. If your god did exist, he'd be accounted history's greatest monster, and this is someone you claim has made you moral?
Citizen, God allows evil to be used for his purposes. That doesn't excuse evil.
Unless Jesus makes you sin he's not responsible for lies you've told, or for when you've been greedy.
Daine, I'm curious what you mean by a "good person".
"Citizen, God allows evil to be used for his purposes. That doesn't excuse evil."
If God allows it, it's not really evil then, is it?
Of course it is. Evil may be used for good but that doesn't make things which are evil, good.
God may allow an evil to occur to prevent a greater evil.
I may need to be cut open to remove a mass of cancer. That doesn't make cutting me open a good thing.
It would be a bit egocentric to assume God doesn't have higher priorities than us.
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