This whole thread is a straw man. What respectable moral philosopher has ever argued that belief in God is necessary for doing good? — Bartricks

It depends on how you define "God". If we take God to be the supreme Good, then being good is acting in harmony with God.

But I agree that the thread may be a straw man. With the US election approaching, there may have been a decision to take up political activism and have a go at the opposition. And whether activism can answer a philosophical question is doubtful. Or, as you say, silly.

My point remains that it is harder to imagine, plan and implement the murder of millions of people on an industrial scale -- e.g. the Holocaust -- within a traditional Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) context than it is to do so within a secular context. — Olivier5

Traditional Christians did pretty well. And Muslims. As to the modern industrial scale, that took modernity. But the potential for murderousness, it appears, has always been there.

It depends on how you define "God". If we take God to be the supreme Good, then being good is acting in harmony with God. — Apollodorus

Except that for most - many - people, this is nonsense. If "we take" then it is no God at all, but a human idea, and being good is acting is harmony with a human idea.

And, how is, what is, any human notion of "supreme good"?

If "we take" then it is no God at all, but a human idea, and being good is acting is harmony with a human idea. — tim wood

If God is a form of universal consciousness, then the higher ideas or ideals of man are expressions of the mind of God.

If God is a form of universal consciousness, then the higher ideas or ideals of man are expressions of the mind of God. — Apollodorus

Word games. What is "universal consciousness" if not at best, most, and least, collective human thought, aka, wishfully, wisdom.

Anything that involves words can be dismissed as "word games" if that's what you want to do. That includes philosophy, ethics, law, politics, and everything else.

Non-responsive. Question: as a matter of fact (you may hold what beliefs you like) is whatever "God" refers to altogether a creation of human intellect and nothing else? Or is it something else?

as a matter of fact (you may hold what beliefs you like) is whatever "God" refers to altogether a creation of human intellect and nothing else? Or is it something else? — tim wood

As you may be aware, this is a question that philosophy has aimed to answer for a very long time and the debate is still ongoing. Meantime, people are free to hold what beliefs they like, as you say.

I have suspected for some time that English is not your native language, and much credit to you for the facility you do have with it. But apparently you do not understand the simple English word "question."

And how would philosophy even pretend to resolve any question about g/God when so-called believers throw that question squarely to simple physics. And then when physics answers, insist that physics is either wrong or somehow incomplete.

Your

this is a question that philosophy has aimed to answer for a very long time and the debate is still ongoing. — Apollodorus

is facile, and in a bad way. X is a question philosophy has aimed to answer for a very long time and the debate is still ongoing. Try substituting different things for X, and you will get a sense of the absurdity and what an insult it is.

It's always a pleasure to see one's thread return from the dead, but this new version is a putrid, festering corpse.

From the article cited in the OP, to which scant attention has been paid:

(Note the outlier on the far right - which country is that? No surprise. )

Being taught that you will be punished if you do not do what you are told is not being taught to be good.

If this thread has any point, it is that this is a lesson taught by economic growth.

Traditional Christians did pretty well. And Muslims. As to the modern industrial scale, that took modernity. But the potential for murderousness, it appears, has always been there. — tim wood

Yes, the potential for mass murder was always there, and remains. The question is how we guard against it in modern secular societies. I believe this takes a bedrock of common values that need to be held as normatively good, and treated as such. The fact that we cannot or rather will not rely on religion to ground those societal values has profound consequences, some obviously positive (like, freedom of conscience; we can have sex with a lot more folks etc.) and others more problematic, like the inability to ground human rights in gods' will anymore. Human rights were historically introduced as god-given and therefore sacred in both the French Déclaration des droits de l'homme and in the American Bill of rights. You can't do this anymore. You can't say in a secular framework: "Human life is sacred", although it is still said of course, including by secularists. And the reason it is still said, is that we modern secularists miss a sense of the sacred to ground our values.

If we take God to be the supreme Good, then being good is acting in harmony with God. — Apollodorus

Unfortunately God doesn’t say how to act, people say how to act, and people aren’t God (supreme Good).

Have you noticed the number of God posts rising again? — Banno

I haven't been around long enough to say. However, the answer to the thread title is, in my estimation, a definitive "No."

I know some folks who believe in god who I think are good and some who I think are bad. Same with folks who don't believe in god. Same with agnostics.

For believers, I think a fault lies in a mistaken belief, by some, that god somehow holds a special place in his heart for human beings. LOL! That's where the bad starts and keeps on a runnin'. Come to think of it, a similar belief holds true for atheists and agnostics. People thinking "we're all that" is the genesis of bad.

and in the American Bill of rights. — Olivier5

Maybe not to your points, which I mostly agree with, but where in the Bill of Rights?

From the article cited in the OP, to which scant attention has been paid ... — Banno

I think we have paid attention.

However, if countries with higher GDP per capita are less likely to tie belief in God to morality, this would appear to confirm the position of theists, viz., that the wealthier people are, the more they are inclined to believe in material possessions and less in God.

Otherwise put, man cannot have two masters, it’s either God or Mammon (Matthew 6:24). And the rich often go for the latter. The article seems to support this.

The thread addresses a straw man because the claim is not that morality requires God (which it does). The claim is that moral behaviour requires 'belief' in God. That's absurd - a total straw man. For example, the view that water is made of molecules is not equivalent to the absurd view that to be able to drink water requires believing it is made of molecules. Atheists prefer to attack these crazy invented views than the real deal partly, no doubt, because they are often too dumb to be able to distinguish them.

In other words, your claim is

To be good -> To believe in God

Sorry to disappoint you but it looks like you're wrong because the contrapositive, To not believe in God -> To be bad, is false.

What is of greater concern, what is a bigger problem, is the converse, To believe in God -> To be good, is false.

If hell - the worst possible situation one can possibly imagine and multiply it by infinity - is no deterrent and if heaven - best-case scenario again times infinity - is no incentive, I'm at a loss as to what can keep us on the straight and narrow.

Also,

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg

Atheists prefer to attack these crazy invented views than the real deal partly, no doubt, because they are often too dumb to be able to distinguish them.[/quote]

You might be right there. But why would they attack anyone in the first place? Are they dumb or malicious? Or perhaps both?

don't see how you can argue that when the Nazi's drew on centuries of Christianity's antisemitism even Martin Luther's well known fulminations against Jews.
— Tom Storm
Centuries during which the Church was more often than not trying to protect Jews from the greed of the powerful and the prejudice of the masses.

Not to mention a 99% Christian nation supported Hitler.
So, since China is in majority atheist and their people support a ruthless and racist dictatorship, it reflects poorly on atheism?

even Martin Luther's well known fulminations against Jews
Just because warmongers often brandish religious reasons does not mean they are motivated by religion. The Nazis used Martin Luther to rally the masses, instrumentally, like they used Darwin or Wagner. It does not follow that their ideology was inherently Lutheran, Darwinian or Wagnerian. — Olivier5

Nice try. I'll go one more but we need to move on.

Your point was that Nazi's were only possible because they removed the Judeo Christian tradition from culture? Clearly wrong.

Gott Mitt Uns - one small example of the Judeo-Christian tradition was not removed from uniforms. The Nazi's cheerfully changed the look of most things but kept this?

My mentioning 99% of Germany as Christian goes to the point that the Nazi's emerged from this tradition and remained overwhelmingly popular. I see you overlook the Nazi's Positive Christianity an official part of their thinking and attraction.

Christians protecting Jews? Some yes, but this doesn't change the Christian roots of anti-semitism - the Jews as Christ killers.

Martin Luther's work On the Jews and their Lies recommends the following:
to burn down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn people against them
to refuse to let Jews own houses among Christians
to take away Jewish religious writings
to forbid rabbis from preaching
to offer no protection to Jews on highways
for usury to be prohibited and for all Jews' silver and gold to be removed, put aside for safekeeping, and given back to Jews who truly convert
to give young, strong Jews flail, axe, spade, and spindle, and let them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow

You can see in this the makings of Kristallnacht and the forced labor camps, no? And no I am not saying Nazism is Lutheran. You seem to miss my point. I am saying that the ethos of the Nazi's draws source material in the Christian tradition you believe they removed. No, they took and intensified the worst of it.

At no point would I argue that all Christians are anti-Semitic or that all Christians supported Hitler. But that's not what's needed to support my point.

where in the Bill of Rights? — tim wood

Sorry, it's in the Declaration of Independence -
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I am saying that the ethos of the Nazi's draws source material in the Christian tradition — Tom Storm

Yes, there were some links there but I think that the Jews were despised for different reasons by different groups:

1. For Christians, they were guilty of killing Jesus.

2. For Marx and his followers they were guilty of being bourgeois money-lovers.

3. For the Nazis they were guilty of (1) supporting Bolshevism and (2) of being an alien race.

The Nazis' argument (2) went back to the 1800s and before.

See also Marx's critique of German Jews that later appears in Nazi propaganda.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

↪Banno In other words, your claim is

To be good -> To believe in God — TheMadFool

That' s exactly wrong.

Unfortunately God doesn’t say how to act, people say how to act, and people aren’t God (supreme Good). — praxis

True, people aren't God. But people say that God gave them the laws according to which they act.

See, for example, the Law of Hammurabi (1792 - 1750 BC):

"Hammurabi is best known for having issued the Code of Hammurabi, which he claimed to have received from Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammurabi

Your point was that Nazi's were only possible because they removed the Judeo Christian tradition from culture — Tom Storm

That is not my point. I am rather saying that the Nazis themselves removed the judeo-christian tradition from their own (personal) thinking, and even hated it. They hardened their own hearts against their religious upbringing. They could not possibly remove Christianity from the German culture at large. But they started by trying to arianize Jesus. At issue here was the obvious fact that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Paul, Petter and all the first followers of Jesus were Jews, which would imply they were, you know, bad folks, so some pronazi theologians started to pretend that Jesus was in fact a good Arian (persecuted by them Juden, as one would expect). They tried to put a Nazi spin on the whole JC drama, in short. Not the first nor the last one to do that; religious myths are eternally being reshaped and retold to suit new purpose and the historical data on Jesus is meagre and vague enough that one can brand him a stoic, a socialist, a feminist, whatever one likes, so why not a Nazi after all. And yes, Luther's disgusting writings on Jews helped them Nazis. But the final solution was not inspired by religion. It was inspired by an ideology that was resolutely modern and secular, a form of social Darwinism.

I appreciate the conversation and your perspective.

It was inspired by an ideology that was resolutely modern and secular, a form of social Darwinism. — Olivier5

Correct. And the social Darwinists the Nazis learned from were none other than Marx and Engels who believed that their generation had to go under to make place for a new type of Socialist Man.

Marx and Engels also believed that the Slavs were an inferior, reactionary race that had to be wiped out in a revolutionary world war ....

Thanks, I liked it too. :smile:

Marx was not a racist, and certainly not an antisemite. You seem a bit confused.

Banno In other words, your claim is

To be good -> To believe in God
— TheMadFool

That' s exactly wrong. — Banno

:ok:

Marx was not a racist, and certainly not an antisemite. You seem a bit confused. — Olivier5

I don't think I'm any more confused than yourself.

Marx and Engels were social Darwinists and definitely advocated the extermination of Slavic nations, for example. See "The Magyar Struggle", etc.

https://historum.com/threads/friedrich-engels-slavophobia.181776/

This later became a central plank in the Nazi program.