Mm. Being the worldly, I have a few things to say.
Excerpt from "The God Delusion", by Richard Dawkins, in "If There is No God, Why Be Good?"
Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: "Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or ot avoid his disapproval and punishment?" That's not morality, that's just just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought". As Einstein said, if people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed". Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape and murder' you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you2. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.
It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness..."
The book goes on this way:
"On the other hand, just to weaken our confidence, listen to Steven Pinker's disillusioning experience of a police strike in Montreal, which he describes in The Blank Slate:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceble Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police when on strike. By 11:20 a.m., the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters..."
Perhaps I, too, am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God. On the other hand, the majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed in God. Why didn't the fear of God restrain them when earthly policemen were temporarily removed from the scene? Wasn't the Montreal strike a pretty good natural experiment to test the hypothesis that belief in God makes us good? Or did the cynic H. L. Mencken get it right when he tartly observed 'People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police'
Obviously, not everybody in Montreal behaved badly as soon as the police were off the scene. It would be interesting to know whether there was any statistical tendency, however slight, for religious believers to loot and destroy less than unbelievers..."
That's the end of my quote of The God Delusion. Here, I personally would like to add that it should be clear to anyone that most people in Montreal in the 1960s were believers, most probably Catholics. The Quiet Revolution was taking place, but I am sure most Quebeckers were still Catholics. JW's will argue that Catholics are not real believers, but we know better. And the question is not whether they believe in the "True Religion", but whether RELIGIOUS BELIEF makes you better.
Have you noticed that Scandinavian countries, where atheism is high, are very humane societies? And if you tell me that there's a lot more of "porneia" there, I have to say that no, there isn't any more. Try any religiously repressed society and you'll see that's not the case.
