Depend on Belief in God?
ATHEISM_ALONE_IS_HUMANITARIAN_
If we want to believe in God we must want it for it is best for us or moral and because God gives us standards to live up to. Then, we will believe in God because it is our duty to. If it is true that we need the belief in order to live a good life then clearly it is our duty to believe in God. Those who do not then are evil whether they mean to be or not and should be stopped and silenced.
Just because God is believed to be perfect goodness does not mean that it is good for us to believe in God or obey him or to hold that people should obey him as we shall see.
Christians do not consult God or the clergy or their Bible all the time about moral issues. They only consult him in very difficult cases - eg for some abortions and when there is a question of euthanasia being a solution. Otherwise they just do what nature inspires them to do just like atheists do. But that does not stop them stating their superiority morally and otherwise to atheists.
You will see Christian mothers who are asked to have an abortion so that they may save their lives and be there for their children. They may refuse believing God does not want them to have an abortion and will look after them. Then they end up dead and their families destroyed and the children turning out anti-social and wallowing in profligacy. Christians know that they can't depend on God to give the right decision. When God is consulted so little in relation to morality it is just badness when a Christian says you need to believe in God to be moral. Even those that do consult him have little faith but they take a chance. If Christians want morality and belief in God to be co-dependent then they should make that true in their own lives all the time.
Christians believe that there is an all-good God and that evil is not a power but a falling short. Its a distorted good or a good that is in the wrong place. When cancer cells grow they are good at growing so that is a good that is in the wrong place. Christians say that to say evil is a power is to say that God must have made evil. It would be a disproof of the existence or the goodness of God. If you accept the argument that evil is not a thing at all then it is possible that cancer is not a real evil. Perhaps it needs to thrive and kill us all off to save us from worse. So you are only able to guess what is good and what is bad. You cannot judge God as good and as having authority unless you have an idea of what good is already in your head. This is really just picking a God that suits what you think and feel. The differences between many religions is about how to determine what religion or scripture speaks with God's authority. So there is nothing you can do. You just pick your moral codes and invent a God for yourself that implements them. To say that morality depends on belief in God or in a God commanding us to believe that x is bad and y is good is really to say that we should treat human thinking and human authority as God.
Some say that the believer says that what is out there and our human lives are ultimately worthwhile and there is a purpose and that purpose is God. They will say that the unbeliever holds that all that exists including our human lives is ultimately purposeless. If that is true then unbelievers are demeaning human nature and trying to prise people away from true happiness. The reply is that we can believe in an ultimate purpose without that purpose being God. Also, to say we need belief in God to have ultimate purpose is admitting that we can feel that there is ultimate purpose even if there is not. Believing in God doesn't prove God is there. If we can create a belief to help ourselves then why should the belief necessarily be belief in God?
If you believe in God, you will believe that your secret bad thoughts and bad feelings about people that you deliberately consent to are offending him. If you are an atheist, it becomes your own business not God. Belief in God gives the burden of thinking there is somebody you offend a lot of the time. It will encourage you to hurt people when you are hurting God anyway. People need God because they think they are unloveable and so they need a God who loves unconditionally to believe in. Unconditional love is only a comfort to the kind of person who doesn't want to earn love but who wishes to be a leech. This love appeals to the person who wants to be helped without deserving it and who doesn't care if God trusts him or her or not. Religion exploits believers.
God commands good.
Does he command it because it is good and he recognises it as good? This view implies that good would be good whether God recognises it as such or not and whether he commands it or not. Commonsense supports this idea. Religion hates it for it means you could have the right to disagree with God.
Or is good good because God commands it? This view teaches that if God wanted a baby tortured to death for mere fun it would be right to please him and do so.
Despite the fact that there are only two options, religion schemes to make us think that this numbering is an oversimplification. It is not. So religion says that God is goodness itself and goodness is his character so he does not invent good but is good and is the objective standard of right and wrong and so he doesn't need to discover it. In other words, God is the source of objective morality. Thus we should do what he commands. It says this is the solution to the problem of how morality and God relate.
So religion seems to be saying these days that when God commands us to do good, we are doing it not just because he commands it but because he is good in his character. It says God being of good character and who never does evil has the qualities of goodness and so he is goodness itself and makes it real. Religion says God does not invent rules about what is right and wrong. It says something is wrong because it is wrong and not just because God says it is wrong. It says that only if there is a God are there objective standards of right and wrong. If there is no God, then we only call things right and wrong because we like and dislike them. Then, it is argued, morality is subjective or based on feelings and notions. Nothing then is really right and wrong.
But whatever could this stuff about good being good objectively because it is the character of God mean? If justice for example is abstract and not a property or power what's fair is fair whether God exists or not. Believers tend to believe that since justice is God's character it is a property or power. It is not just a concept.
Believers may object to the idea of justice/love/morality being an abstract concept and not a property. You can read the objections we are about to answer on page 90, The Future of Atheism).
They will say you can't say the moral values exist if they are just abstract concepts. But it is not existence that matters. It is if they are true that matters. Justice doesn't have to be a thing or power to be true.
They will say that unless there is a God and or people to act justly you cannot say justice exists. That is nonsense. Even if there was absolutely nothing at all it would still be true that it is cruel to hurt an innocent baby. This is obviously true whether babies exist or not.
Even if say justice were a property and not simply an abstraction, how would you know that the property is really good? Just because something is a property or a power does not mean that it is good. You need an abstract concept of justice to show that this property of justice is good. So you can't get away from the abstract. To say things like God having the power called love means we must be loving as well makes no sense unless an abstract quality says this love is good.
The psychopath may have no sense of love as a power or of justice as a power. He does not feel the the power of love in his heart. Yet we expect him to love others not by feeling for he cannot. We expect him to love others by doing right by them. The idea that love is a property or power is absurd. The love that is the property or feeling has to be judged by the abstract to see if it is really love. The love of a mother that urges her son to kill everybody else so that the mother will have nobody to love but him is love as in power but when judged by the abstract of love, that is judged by love the abstraction, it is seen that it is not love at all.
Suppose God is the objective standard of goodness. He will command some things for a mysterious purpose. For example, if most marriages end in disaster that will not stop him commanding marriage even though it is largely asking for trouble. Who cares then if morals are objective or subjective? Even if we establish that the God idea implies that there is an objective standard of morality, the problem of knowing what he wants us to do makes us wonder why we bother trying to establish that. Maybe God needs us to think that morals are subjective for some purpose?
Why should we be good if it is God has the power of good? If we agree with religion that we should then we are saying that good being an energy and a power and not an abstraction means we should be good. But why bring God in? Why can't we say that mother has the power of good so us, her children, should be good too? To say that our mother having the power of good does not imply we should be good too and to say that God having this power does is really snobbery. Just because God is big and powerful does not mean we should be like him. To disagree is insulting the mother you see in favour of a being you don't see, a being who may not exist at all. So rather than defending morality and the concept of moral obligation, faith in God actually condemns and mocks them and advocates a semblance of morality - not morality.
Suppose that love being a power means we must love. Then it is love being a power that obligates us not who does the loving. Thus we see the idea clarifies that nobody should say that because God has the power of love we must love like him. And if we can, we can also say that because we experience the power of love in our hearts and that we get our obligation to love from that. We see nothing that commands us to take our sense of moral obligation from belief in God.
Even if goodness is God's character, we still need to judge if he is good and we can only do that by checking it out using a standard he has not set up. We know that it is good to feed a hungry baby. We don't need belief in God to tell us that. Feeding the baby is good. Suppose it is immoral for us. Perhaps the food will kill the baby or we hope it will. But feeding the baby is good in itself. The intention is bad. If we believe in being good, really good, who gives a shit about morals assuming morals are different?
What is right or best is a true idea. If you see three dogs that does not mean the number three in itself really exists like a block of concrete exists. But is a true idea that there are three dogs. To try and turn right and best and moral into powers and to say that they are nothing else is actually to deny them. If they are true ideas, then to say they are not but they are something like things or forces is to oppose them. It is like looking at a banana and saying that the banana is three and the abstract concept of three does not exist. To say that a hen is the sound ZZZ is to deny that the real ZZZ is the real ZZZ. The attempts to use God to establish an objective morality establishes only a pretend objective morality. Nothing more.
We do good either because we are commanded to do it by God or some moral code or because it is good. If we do it just because it is commanded then we are not doing it because it is good even if it is called good. It is obvious that even God cannot invent good. Something doesn't become good just because God commanded it. We affirm that goodness is independent of God.
We do good for it is good and not because some standard or God says it is good. This is the atheist answer to those who say we cannot really believe in being loving and just unless we believe in God. Those who say that are the ones who cannot believe in true goodness.
Even if there were no God and no universe and nothing at all there would still be some good. For example, there would be no suffering. God can't invent good. He has to subject himself to it. Hurting a baby would be evil whether there is a God or not and shame on religion for trying to say different. They imply it would be fine to hurt the baby if there were no God. Something has to be good or evil. If something is neither then that is the same as saying it is both equally so you can't get away from good and evil.
To make such an extreme claim for God, that the concept is needed before you can condemn the torturing of a baby, demands that we need absolute proof that God exists and that he has spoken. Even fundamentalist religion admits it hasn't got that! The God concept requires you to say that you have got it and that anybody that says otherwise is threatening morality and must be destroyed or imprisoned.
God
wants us to do good because he commanded it for he says as he is the perfectly
good person and creator he is to be loved above all things and he is the
boss. That means then that the good is
not good at all. If you are doing it
because you were told and not because you see it as good even if you do see it
as good then the good is evil. It is
artificial good. It demeans yourself for it is not very adult.
If
you do something because it is good you are not doing it just because the rules
say it is good but because it is good.
Some say that doing something good because it is good means you care
more about good than others. For
example, if you return a lost purse to its owner you may care more about the
rule not to keep the purse than the person’s rights. But if you do that you are doing good not because it is good but because you were commanded
by a rule.
The
facts are these. You can’t care without
doing good and you can’t do good without caring. The two go together for doing something
because it is good and caring mean the same thing. We have to do good because WE see it as good
and not because God or the Church tells us to do it. If we do it just because of divine or Church authority
commanding it then we are not very sure that we are doing right. We would be less sure we are doing right than
we would be if we saw that the good was good and chose to do it. Therefore you do not need belief in God to
justify belief in right and wrong. We
are on our own on this one. No authority
or God or Church has the right to tell us what to believe in right and wrong
for it is up to us to listen and to judge for ourselves. Yet Jesus and the apostles and the Roman
Catholic clergy claim authority to tell us what to do.
To love the rules that anybody else makes for you is to put that person’s word above the rules. You end up claiming to love goodness supremely though you don’t. You should use your own reason and let goodness speak for itself. Obeying the rules of God is disobeying goodness. Love does not exist when you listen to God and not reason alone.
If you tie God and morality together, you end up saying one has a moral obligation to believe in God and whatever God teaches. In fact, you cannot have an obligation to believe anything for you either believe it or you don't. You end up saying that dogma should be enforced by moral law. Disagreements about dogma are really petty. Disagreements about morality may cause harm and confusion that results in people mistakenly doing wrong or putting people off the idea of worrying about moral instruction. Bringing God or dogma in only results in the credibility of morality being reduced and seems to want to justify the pettiness of disagreements about dogma. There is so much disagreement about morality that to say your moral ideas come from God really translates as, "I know what God wants and therefore who is as wonderful as me? My moral beliefs are fantastic so I'd expect God to agree with me." Its blasphemy.
Could
it be that we have to obey God because he made us and he is good and so he has
the right to be obeyed? But even then we
should be obeying good not God. He would not be good if he wanted it any
other way for he does not need anything from us. A boss only has authority when he or she has
to show the way to good. Strictly
speaking, he or she has no authority of his or her own at all. It is not him or her we obey but the goodness
that is expressed through him or her. We
only have bosses and authorities for the sake of order. Somebody needs to make final decisions.
Each one of us
wants to see what is good by our own resources and by our own authority.
We find it off-putting if somebody tries to impose their idea of right and wrong
on us and that includes God. The God belief only puts people off being
truly good. Even if we decide we must let God decide for us what is good
and what is evil the fact remains that
we
have still decided what good is namely
what God regards as good. We cannot get away from our wish to decide for
ourselves independently of God.
A belief that puts people off moral authority - or should put them off if it doesn't - such as the God belief can hardly be said to be necessary for believing in morality. God botherers are causing a lot of trouble by claiming that belief in God and belief in morality go together and that one is essential to the other. It is like encouraging an athlete to win when you know that she can't win. Its patronising and cynical.
Another
way the God belief hopes to produce monsters is how it implies that God should
be obeyed just because he is powerful which sanctions the might is right
fanaticism. We don’t need to obey him
just because he is good for good has its own authority and you cannot obey a
person just because they are good. Being
good doesn’t necessarily mean you always get it right. You obey your own perception of what good is
and which therefore says good should be done – the
perception that the person inspired.
God’s authoritarianism has been a cancer in the world and has fomented
bigotry and resentment in his worshippers for you come
to resemble what you adore. God cannot
then give meaning to life for the God concept is evil. God is evil if he made us for himself. If he didn’t, then we can make our own
decisions.
If
God should be obeyed as our boss then morality is not about maximising
happiness.
This
rejection of the importance of happiness is encapsulated in the very idea of
God for religion says that suffering and even the extreme suffering that is
despair is part of God’s plan.
You
end up saying that rules matter and not goodness because anybody can make up a
rule and say it is a good rule once you divorce morality from increasing
pleasure. Pleasure and happiness alone
can tell us what good is and they are the simplest ways to work out what good
is. It is impossible to see how we could
like God even if he is good.
The
God concept destroys morality in many ways.
If God exists you will be punished for doing evil. If God does not exist you still have to do
good though you will not have him to punish you. You should not do good to avoid punishment
but because it is good. So if you need
to believe in God it is so that you and others might be punished. The doctrine then is vindictive for it is
unnecessary.
To
help others just to please God means you just do it for God and not them. You cannot help God for he is all-powerful
and all-god and therefore all-happy. So
whatever you do for God is not really good for it is not intended to be. Loving God is hating
humanity.
We believe that things like stealing and murder are
wrong more easily and more strongly than we believe religious assertions that
God exists or that God is a Trinity or that the Catholic Church alone has the
true revelation of God. The religious
beliefs are supposed to come first and we are supposed to believe and practice
morality because of them. We are
supposed to refrain from theft and homicide because God forbids them and not
because they are wrong. We are supposed
to make religious belief the strongest. We
are supposed to make the religious beliefs the foundation of the other beliefs
such as that stealing is wrong. This
weakens or attempts to weaken our belief in the morals which is a disgrace and
proves that religion should be scrapped (page 557, Reason and Belief). If you believe that theft is wrong then well
and good but if you believe because God says it then you don’t see how wrong
theft is for you are only interested in God forbidding it. That is what I mean by God weakening your
faith in morality. Faith is often weak
so religion is the enemy of safety and of morality and right and wrong. Religion
is the friend of honeyed hypocrisy.
The
argument that we need a God to tell us what right and wrong are is wrong. When we need to be told then we cannot figure
it out so the result will be a morality that we obey just because God says so. That is just as dangerous as God inventing
the ethics.
Secular students of ethics say that instead of
saying, “Do not harm others unless there is no other way”, we must say, “”Do no
harm.” The reason is that all evil
people who have done terrible things say the first. The pope says that when his contraception ban
spreads AIDS that there is no other way.
Hitler said that the Jews had to be destroyed so that Germany could
progress forever and that this vision justified their deaths in the long
run. To be really true to the principle
you have to deny belief in God and discourage it for God implies that “Do not
harm others unless there is no other way” is true for God practices it. God would say he made the AIDS virus for a
good purpose.
Christians say you can’t blame God if you get a
heart attack for you should have gone easy on the fries and the beer. It is only right that if anybody is to be
blamed it should be God. The person
should get the benefit of the doubt.
After all many people eat bad diets and have a long lifespan.
When we do not need God to justify morality and he has nothing to do with it anyway it is clear that Atheism is true humanitarianism not religion. Christians only do good as far as they are Atheists be it in thought or deed or both.
Usually when people say we need to believe in God to have a morality, they mean they need God to accept a harsh and foolish morality. It is the kind of morality that refuses to protect a loving relationship between a man and woman "living in sin" and having lots of children to look after. The psychopath may have no conscience but he or she still sees on an intellectual level at least that killing people is bad. All people see what good is and religion comes along to complicate things and condemn many good things as bad and uphold many bad things as good. Religious morality is about control not people.
The Church advises that we should believe in the morality God reveals to be on the safe side. This is Pascal's argument that we should believe in God and the Catholic religion for if we don't we could end up in Hell forever so it is safer to believe and even if we are wrong we will be virtuous nonetheless. Against that it could be argued, "It is the best and the only safe route to stick to the principles that all people of faith and people of none believe in such as not sexually abusing children etc than to worry about specific religious rules eg, if a woman is going to have sex with her AIDS stricken husband you are expected to encourage her to ask him not to use a condom. That way you are sure of being virtuous". Religion and God then are against real morality and commonsense.
Religious morality only leads to lies and unfairness. Take Catholicism. It tries to turn people against the pill with arguments such as what follows. "The pill causes havoc with a woman's body. It could damage her fertility forever. It kills any baby she conceives by preventing implantation. It increases the risk of breast cancer." The Mormons argue against drinking tea, "It contains a drug that is bad for you and addictive. It can prevent you sleeping." I could mention the Jehovah's Witnesses who say that blood transfusions have lead to disease and AIDS being spread and use that thinking to prevent their members thinking that blood transfusions may be had. These conniving cults purposely ignore the fact that there are risks with everything we do. If Catholicism, to pick one out, was not trying to manipulate women and society to turn against the pill it would condemn driving a car with a petrol engine and would certainly condemn smoking which does far more harm than the pill ever could. In reality the reasons given have nothing to do with Catholicism banning birth control at all. It is because they won't admit that their faith is wrong. They are trying to make it seem that they prohibit because they care. They are insecure about the reasons for their prohibiting and so they have to use subterfuge.
It is not a nice reflection on the believers when they need a God to motivate them and scare them into being what they call moral!
The Church opposes good and puts a clever counterfeit in its place.
Himmler believed he should inflict horrors on innocent people because his leader persuaded him it was best for Germany. This does not excuse what he did (page 14, Ethics: The Fundamentals) or anybody who approves of what he did. Islam and Christianity with their doctrine that certain sinners such as heretics or homosexuals will suffer in Hell forever without any hope of release just make a caricature of that principle. They approve of the horrors these sinners may face.
The Church says that God comes first and not only that but all we do
should be entirely done for his sake. So
what God thinks matters and what we think does not. But real good requires a lot of discerning
what good is and doing that and trusting entirely in yourself for you have to
decide for yourself what is good for you and others. So God is in opposition to goodness and
therefore love. It is in opposition to
difference. All are called to become
clones of God for he is perfection itself.
The view that God has made some people to be good at nursing and others
have the talent for teaching does not refute this but actually supports it for
all are made weak and are called to be perfect at everything and these talents
are only encouraged for when we are weak there is no other option but to zoom
in on what we are good at and develop that as a prime concern. Think of it this way. People are asked what they would have on
their gravestone for an epitaph. When
God comes first and loving him with all your being is the supreme law it
follows that the epitaph should be, “She tried to love God”, or, “He did not
try to love God.” Whatever is not best
is what is wrong. Such a God cannot give
meaning to life except by the craftiness of the Church which deludes people to
think that they need him and which corrupts their thinking and makes their
emotional needs abnormal. We need a
world that celebrates diversity not one that tolerates it. God is in opposition to such
celebration. Any version of God that is
not is just a pile of inconsistency and not a real God.
I will
spell out another way that God removes a sense of purpose in life. Christians say they get meaning in life from
the fact that God loves them no matter what they do. So they have to pretend the shamelessly
absurd lie that the sinner can be loved while their sin is hated is true. Believing that God loves us unconditionally
may make us feel safer but it should not.
In real life, we tend to feel safe if we prove ourselves to be
worthwhile people. God’s love cannot
make us feel safe without that so to derive comfort from it is indicatory of
disordered self-esteem because you need the God-crutch. God’s love can ask for some horrible things
so there is no sense in feeling safe with him
The
Church says that God has put a need for him inside all of us. That follows from the doctrine that God is
completely good and that he has created all things and done so for himself. But if it is the good you want you don’t
really want him. The Church says then
that he is his goodness so to want goodness is the same thing as wanting him
which doesn’t really make any sense. A
man can want his wife’s beauty and though her beauty is her to love her beauty
is not the same as loving her. Jesus
said there is no greater love than giving your life – all you have – for your
friends. The Church says that the purest
love seeks nothing in return. “To pardon rather than be pardoned, love rather than be loved”, as
the awful prayer of St Francis of
If God is a need then he is the most important need of all for he is supreme good and our creator. It follows then that secularism and atheism are endangering that need and must be regarded as being opposed to human rights and worthy of suppression. Rights are based on needs not wants. I may want a child but that does not give me a right to have one. I need food so I have a right to food. I don't have a right to have a child for I have no need to.
Now
back to the doctrine that God put the need for him in us. Why did he do it? For our good? For his? Or for both? It is not for our good for if he made us see
the need for happiness and how to get it better there would be no need for him
to interfere or get involved. There
would be no need for us to need him. He
created a need where there should be none and since love respects freedom above
all else it is unmistakeably true that God does not care about us when he
constricted our freedom by making us need him.
So he put the need in us for his good alone (further implying that
nothing and nobody matters but him – what a callous monster!). And he does not need us to need and worship and
work for him for he is almighty and perfect and self-sufficient. You cannot be a perfect being without being
self-sufficient. So he just wants us to
adore him though he does not need that adoration. A person who has to work for a God who does not need it, is just a slave even if he does
get rewards. What benefit would the
rewards be when you have not really achieved anything? How can you achieve anything or feel you have
achieved, by loving a God who does not need you or your love? Jesus declared in the John gospel that his
disciples are not servants or slaves for they know the master’s business. A slave can know his master’s business and
still be a slave so that was another of Jesus’ many peccadilloes. Though Jesus said we must be perfect as our
Father in Heaven is perfect, he emptied this adage of any meaning whatsoever
when he emphasised our overwhelming and eternal dependence on God. To be perfect is to be self-sufficient but
when God’s help is what makes a person good according to the Christian gospel
it is obvious that we are never perfect in ourselves. We only act that way for we have the props. The need for God is created by the Church and
it is created for its own benefit and not ours or God’s.
Nobody can say it is ever good to believe in God. Those who are made happy by the belief are in delusion and to say this delusion is a good thing is to talk nonsense. These people are being used by the clergy. When you are deluded you might think your delusion is one that makes you cheery but when you are deluded you will never know if you would be happier with another delusion or none. It’s still bad. It’s still degrading. When all is said and done, the main reason religion and God thrive is because there are so many questions that people never think to ask themselves or don’t take the time to. Atheism wants people to ask themselves the questions about religion and faith that they wouldn’t normally ask and that is a vital part of the therapy the system offers. When they do that many surprises will surface. For example, the person who would insist that he or she is a 95% Catholic in outlook and faith may when he or she asks himself or herself the right questions could discover that he or she is really only 10% Catholic! The Church takes advantage of people not getting to know themselves and what they really think. It takes advantage of the human tendency to believe something because of the arguments presented while forgetting to look for and ask for missing information that would give you a totally different outlook.
We can be content with imperfect happiness and yet we have the Church trying to condition us to believe that we want perfect happiness and hey presto the solution for getting this happiness is God! This is a cruel set-up and shows the Church is an evil confidence trick.
If you err even with the best of intentions you still do harm. You harm your power to perceive the truth every time you err. You harm yourself though you feel no pain. You harm others by giving an example of error to them. To err is to take the side of error even if you never get the chance to express and live out your error. If somebody is wrong but sincere we can praise them for the sincerity but not for being wrong.
Moral fictionalism is common in modern philosophy. It teaches that morality is incoherent logically but it is better to go along with it. Its fictitious but stick with it, is the advice given. For example, they will say that the law do the greatest good and the least evil contradicts the law that you can't kill a person to get their organs that are needed to save five lives through transplants. They say a mother is not obligated to give her kidney to save her son from certain death. Then they say that you should kill two other people to save your own life.
They can't say their rules are about preventing people from taking advantage of them. If the law is good that lets you kill to save five lives by providing transplants then it is good and can't be banned just because people abuse it. Knives are abused and you don't ban them. They are not concerned about people taking advantage when they make their rules and then make other ones that contradict them!
If moral fictionalism is true, then it is making things worse if you begin bringing the moral laws of God and religion into the debate. If morality is fiction or myth, it is therefore immoral if you try to justify any moral code by saying God revealed it and God never lies and never makes mistakes. Most people even religious ones don't worry about religious rules all the time. They just get on with life. Fictionalism would justify the morality of secularism better than religion. For example, all want to believe that animals should not be gratuitously tortured to death. But in religion, there is disagreement about what we should do. Some want us to hold Sabbath on a Friday and others on a Saturday and others on a Sunday! And so on ad nauseum!
If moral fictionalism is true, then to say morality is right for God gave it and enacted its laws is to make it even more fictitious not less. If you tell a lie, you make that lie worse by saying God told you it was the truth. To make morality more fictitious than it is is to work for its demolition.
If fictionalism is true, there is nothing belief in God or religion can do to make it untrue. The religions all claim they are able to make it untrue and they cannot all be right.
The view that if somebody has harmful religious beliefs that it is none of our business as long as they are sincere is wrong. If it would be our business if they were insincere then the fact that they are sincere makes them more dangerous. It is even more our business then! At least if they are insincere they know they are wrong and on the side of wrong. The whole point of it being our business is stopping the harm. It is not about interfering with their intentions as intentions for we can't change anybody's intentions for them. Belief in God endangers morality. If you suppose that the belief has no relevance to morality then it follows that emphasising God like religionists do is bad. The more you emphasise, the worse it is.
Catholicism should believe that birth control is evil - its part of its identity as a religion. Catholicism can't be the true religion if it is wrong about how sinful birth control is. But people should separate from it so that there will be no Catholicism left to believe it. If you belong to or claim to belong to a religion that should believe evil things, then even if it doesn't, you are being evil and supporting evil. A religion that doesn't understand or admit or see how evil it is meant to be is a religion that is being praised for going against itself. It is no compliment to praise it for you are praising ignorance and disobedience. Separate from it.
Conclusion
The God-belief is a danger to
our standards of right and wrong. Those who
say it is essential to believe in God before one can believe in any of these standards
are lying for there is nothing in this book that hasn’t been constantly said to
the Church by its critics over the centuries.
Belief in God is bad for us therefore to promote the belief is bad. To say we must believe in God to be moral
implies that the evil doctrine that "an act is never good in itself but needs a
God to approve of it to make it good" is true. This is because it implies that
even child rape, for instance, would be good if God allowed it. If good is
independent of belief in God then no big deal should be made of God. It would
mean that good is good whether there is a God or not. We have enough
trouble trying to work out right and wrong without religion adding to the
difficulties and making a laughing stock of our efforts.
Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch Publications, East Sussex, 1995
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, Robert B Stewart, SPCK, London , 2008
Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007