Sunday, February 14, 2010

Can an Atheist be Moral?

Can an atheist be moral, or be a person of upstanding moral character? The quick answer that I've heard from many Christians is of coarse "yes." Now with that being said, since an atheist can be a moral person, why does the atheist need to accept Christ into their life?

If I as an atheist can be moral, without being a Christian, that what purpose does Christianity play then? Is accepting Christ into my life more important than being a person of high moral character? What is more important: The acceptance of Christ or the moral foundation to live by? If the answer is the former than it is clear that being a Christian and accepting Christ is more important than living by the morals preached by Christ.

Now the theist will say something like: Well if you don't accept Christ, even if you have your morals right, you're not believing that they are divinely ordered and that they are merely man-made and arbitrary. Well, as I have written before I think all our morals are to a degree man-made. I think there are some natural morals like the one about killing for example, it clearly can't ever be moral to kill for no reason, but it does get tricky when we mention war, self-defense, and fighting over survival.

Bottom line, an atheist can be moral and these morals don't necessarily need to be divinely enforced for a person to live by them. We must be watchful for evildoers who want to erode basic decent morality from society as well as those who want to enforce supposed laws from God (Shar'ia Law for example) on us.

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