But there is no god (and, if you mean the Bible or the Qur'an, many of "god's commandments" are immoral).
Therefore, if you are moral (or immoral), god has nothing to do with it.
The immorality of religion
In Chapter Fifteen of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the author (Christopher Hitchens) writes:There are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And these faults and crimes are not to be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can sometimes be exemplary) but in its original precepts. These include:
• Presenting a false picture
of the world to the innocent
and the credulous
• The doctrine of blood sacrifice
• The doctrine of atonement
• The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment
• The imposition of impossible tasks and rules
...
Blood Sacrifice
Before monotheism arose, the altars of primitive society reeked of blood, much of it human and some of it infant. The thirst for this, at least in animal form, is still with us....
Atonement
Previous sacrifices of humans, such as the Aztec and other ceremonies from which we recoil, were common in the ancient world and took the form of propitiatory murder. An offering of a virgin or an infant or a prisoner was assumed to appease the gods: once again, not a very good advertisement for the moral properties of religion....
However, the idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled C. S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life.
Let us just for now overlook all the contradictions between the tellers of the original story and assume that it is basically true....
[pp. 205,206,208,209]
Congratulations on your device for countering religious nonsense. I hope to see more of these syllogisms on Moristotle.
ReplyDeleteIn mathematical logic, the truth table value of the expression "If A then B" is True when "A" is False. That's why it's difficult to refute a "B" in which the subject is god. It's not conclusions (B's) that should be challenged, but premises (A's); e.g., "God exists."
The plan of your syllogisms (of three sentences, "a," "b," and "c"), of course, is to challenge "a" with the statement, "But god does not exist," then counter with "c."