This is a point of view about the article “What Are the Values of a Family Without God / Who Raises Their Children Better: Atheists or Believers?” which was written in Los Angeles in the LA Times in English, and translated to Portuguese at this link.
Some comments about the article above (it’s worth reading the article).
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It’s a fact, the growth of atheists and agnostics. I believe this is largely due to the fact that we have lived for centuries having only two options: the disgrace of society or pretending we believe in the predominant religion.
With the evolution of intelligence and access to books being easier, we’ve reached a point where half-truths no longer satisfy modern man.
Now two points are important: it is impossible to be an atheist and consistently happy. Atheism gives you a life where morality and hope are based either on the roll of the dice or on rules invented to explain the ability of any animal to have morality.
In a world without God, who is responsible for deciding which values are right and which are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only culturally and personally relative values.
This means it is impossible to condemn war, oppression or crime as evil. It is also impossible to praise generosity, self-sacrifice and love as good things.
Killing someone or loving someone would be morally equivalent. Because in a universe without a God, good and evil do not exist — there is only weak and meaningless existence, and there is no one to tell you whether you are right or wrong. “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted – Fyodor Dostoyevsky”.
An atheist cannot at any moment counter decisions like those of the Russians or Germans in the Second World War, because if there is no God, and if there is no right or wrong defined by a superior being, perhaps the decisions of those ‘immoral’ leaders are just the result of how they ‘evolved.’ This is the main point of difficulty in Sartre’s discourse in his thesis “Existentialism is a Humanism,” he has a lot of difficulty trying to clarify the contradiction between the denial of pre-established values by a divinity and his inner need to affirm that humans have values.
To finish, I find it funny that the article says atheists have the ‘Golden Rule, which means treating others as we would like to be treated.’
Two thousand years ago, in the middle of the biggest religious crisis the Jews had ever had, Jesus had the same speech: “summing up everything I tried to teach you: love God above everything and your neighbor as yourself.” Funny that modern man is ‘re-creating’ Christ’s speech to in some way mischaracterize the possibility that he could contribute to a better society.