Many Christians and possibly other theists will say that without God, we would not be moral.  They must have a really poor opinion of themselves!  The person you know best is yourself and  yet they are saying that the only reason they are moral, the only reason they don't go around lying, stealing and even murdering, is because God told them not to.  That sounds a bit like a criminal psychotic who only avoids criminal behavior because he is afraid of getting caught.  Psychologists tell us that this is a sick abnormal behavior; that normal people are not like that.

Or maybe it's because God inspired me to be good?  Or taught us to be good?  The best way to inspire is by example - and we all know the stories in the bible where god teaches us to murder, plunder, commit genocide, keep slaves and generally do things that are evil by my standards.  But then the new testament Jesus taught us to "turn the other cheek" and he quoted the saying that was well known at the time "Do unto others only what you would have them do unto you".   But then his Church went about torturing heretics, starting wars in god's name etc so I suppose the teaching did not catch on too well.  Maybe everyone remembered the time when he whipped the money lenders out of the temple - at least when it suited them.

But let's for the moment assume that goodness came from God for those that do happen to behave themselves.  Then why do billions of Hindus and Buddhists have the least violent society on earth yet they don't believe in god?  Sorry, it does not compute.

Another version of "all morality comes from god" is that if god says so or god wills it, then by definition it must be good.  That's very convenient for the argument - but the problem is, we cannot follow god's direction since we can't know his will.  It changes all the time.  God's will could be to kill a bunch of people with a Hurricane or it could be to blow up some infidels (or not).  It really can be anything that happens and after the fact "it's God's will".  Bullshit.

The following cartoon illustrates another conundrum - how can we tell what to do to follow god's will?

Connecting god with goodness is a meaningless concept with no logic.  Sounds good in a sermon - makes Christians, Muslims and Jews feel that god will look after them.  A few examples where that was really true would help - but I've never heard of god making anything happen that could not have happened anyway.  And all the well behaved atheists around tell us that they at least do not need god to be good.  Last I checked most of them were well behaved.

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