There’s No Need for a Higher Authority

Squashed Asks: Do you have anything that you consider a higher authority than yourself to test your beliefs against? What in your life are you forced to wrestle with, even if it makes you uncomfortable?

I don’t see the purpose of the desire for a higher authority, to be honest. Believing anything based simply upon the authority of someone else is a terrible idea, and I think this can be applied to gods as well.

Even if I were to find out that there is, in fact, a “higher power” in the universe, I’d be quite skeptical of believing the things that it said or doing the things that it told me to do simply because it was bigger or smarter or more powerful than I am. I’d prefer to see evidence of why I ought to listen to that higher authority before choosing whether or not it was worth doing so.

Where Does Morality Come From Anyway?

How do you make moral and ethical decisions on a day-to-day basis? To what extent do you consider yourself guided by your religion in that decision-making process?

Not having a sense of morality is something that atheists tend to be commonly accused of, and it’s one of the accusations we face that I personally find to be extremely hurtful in it’s basic bigotry and ignorance. I doubt there are many atheists who haven’t been asked, by some Christian who thinks they’re about to win an argument, “Well, if there’s no God, why don’t you just go around raping and murdering people?”

Seriously. This comes up a lot, and it’s kind of scary to me. Are there truly a significant number of people who only manage to avoid raping and murdering others because they’re held in check by something they heard in church? I hope not. If there are, I would hate to cause one of those people to have a crisis of faith.