You don’t need God— to hope, to care, to love, to live.

The message will be spread via bus, billboard, and YouTube video.

The goal of this campaign is to dispel some of the false beliefs about atheists, namely that they are selfish, immoral people.

“One common myth is that the nonreligious lead empty, meaningless, selfish, self-centered lives. This is not only false, it’s ridiculous,” says CFI president and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay.

But, not everyone agrees that you can have a good life without god.

“You are talking about joy, and pleasure, and goodness and so on. If you’re employing words like that and you have no objective basis for the reality of those words … in other words, if you don’t believe in a moral law giver who actually gives meaning to the words good and evil, you can … put up billboards all day long and they mean nothing,” [Craig Hazen, director of the M.A. Program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in Southern California] told The Christian Post.

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The only way to know good, joy and love or even pain is if there is a moral law giver who can actually communicate those things, he maintained.

“Apart from that, you make it up as you go.”

He’s right, in a sense. The Christian definition of “good” is “whatever God says,” and the definition of “bad” is “everything else.”

Old Testament-style rape and genocide=good!

Gender rolls that don’t respect women=good!

Fearthought=good!

Homosexuals are an abomination=good!

So, yeah, the word “good” does not mean the same to an atheist as it does to a Christian. In fact, most atheists wouldn’t want that definition of good.

The same goes for love. In Christianity, love comes from God. “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) So, creating humans and giving them a code of morality that you know they can’t follow, then punishing them when they don’t follow it, is love. Sending your son to be beaten and killed in order for you to forgive the beings you created for not being able to follow the rules you knew they couldn’t follow is love.

And then there’s joy! Joy means putting Jesus first, then others, then yourself! Joy means giving your life to serve the Lord, no matter what hardships it entails.

So, he’s right! We do have to make up our own definitions of those words!

Hazen went further to contend that an unbeliever is actually “borrowing the Christian worldview to give your atheist life meaning.”

“I just don’t know where they’re getting their concept of good. They are just random bags of molecules. Morality … does not apply to random bags of molecules,” he said.

I think I demonstrated above that we are not using the Christian definitions. And nothing about my life as an atheist has anything borrowed from the worldview I had as a Christian.

I don’t believe that I need to be a wife and mother, and nothing else. I don’t believe that I need to tithe to the church, even if that leaves us without enough money for food. I don’t believe that I need to chastise myself for thinking normal human thoughts, like “hey, that man (who isn’t my husband) is attractive” or “I don’t always like being around my kids.”

So, where are we getting our concept of good? I mean, after all, we’re just random bags of molecules.

Well, fortunately, we are random bags of molecules with sentience. All throughout human history, people have had a concept of good. More or less, the concept is the same. But, I don’t think they were all borrowing from Christianity.

In the first 30 seconds, Comfort explains the trick of his “lie detector,” which he explains isn’t really a lie detector.  In other words, he is using deception and trickery to lure people in to hearing his gospel message.  If the word of God were true, why would he need to resort to dishonest tactics to get people to believe it?

I guess it’s okay for Comfort to be a liar, breaking one of the Ten Commandments, because Jesus has him covered.  Funny, when I was a Christian, being saved was not considered license to sin.

The part that really bothered me comes at about 1:50 into the video where he gives them the real test.  “How many lies have you told?… Have you ever stolen something?… So, you’re a liar and a thief; do you still think you’re a good person?”

What a terrible thing to say to someone you don’t even know.  Calling a person a liar and a thief carries the implication that lying and stealing are a part of the person’s character.  That’s not typically how one would describe a person who has ever lied, occasionally lies, or tells little white lies, or has stolen even once in their life.  And having ever done those things does not mean one is not a good person.

The real question is, does he think he’s a good person?  It’s obvious he’s not because a good person would not feel the need to go around and accuse people of having deficient character based on even the smallest slip up at any point in their lives.  (There’s another Way of the Master video that says even if you stole a piece of candy as a child, you are a thief.)  A good person would not need to drag others down and make them feel worthless and bad.

But, see, Comfort does not think he is a good person.  That’s why he needs God to be real.  He needs to know that he’s been forgiven for being such a wretched person.  He is the one with the real problem.

I have found, and Harris alludes to this, that there exists basically two schools of thought on morality – that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions (and that those answers come from god) and that there are no absolute right and wrong answers to moral questions.  This has always troubled me.  I remember talking about this in philosophy class in college.  At that time I was not religious, but the idea that there are no moral absolutes just did not fit with my understanding of the world.

During the time I was a Christian, I found that I liked the idea of having answers to moral questions that were grounded in some sort of authority, but I didn’t always find that the answers themselves were what I would consider right and I didn’t like the fact that the answers came from a culture that existed thousands of years ago.  It always seemed that, with all of our advancements in the last 2,000 years, we must know something that isn’t in the Bible.

Sam Harris is saying that there is a third option – that there are answers to questions about values, even if we don’t have those answers (ie. from religion), and that we can find those answers the way we find answers to other questions.

He starts by saying that the separation between science and values is an illusion.  Most people think science does not have anything to say about values because science deals in facts, and facts and values are in different spheres.  Values are a certain kind of fact; they are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.  There are truths to be known about the way human beings flourish, even if we don’t know those answers.  In order to find those answers, we have to admit that these questions have answers.  He adds that admitting that there are right and wrong answers about how human beings will flourish will change the way we talk about morality.

He likens finding the answers to moral questions to finding the answers to scientific questions, in that there are experts in science and there are opinions that are and should be disregarded when discussing scientific questions (ie. answers from non-scientists).  Moral questions should be approached the same way, in that (1) they have answers and (2) there are experts as well as people whose opinions should be disregarded.

I think he is really on to something that could totally change the way we talk about morality, as he says.  I think that anyone who is not religious can clearly see the problems with religious answers to moral questions, such as Islam’s treatment of women or fundamentalist Christianity’s treatment of gays (and sometimes women).  Yet, it is impossible to have a conversation about these issues without admitting that moral questions do have answers.  After all, how can their answers be wrong unless there are right and wrong answers?  If we could take that step, then we could use the knowledge that we have to determine the best answers to those questions.

If we would talk more about moral questions having answers, how to arrive at those answers, and what those answers might be, it would take that discussion out of the realm of religion.  Because right now, that is where those answers are found.  Religion is where people turn when they need answers, but those answers are often wrong and, sometimes, even dangerous.

I know there are already experts out there in the realm of finding answers to moral questions outside of a religious framework.  I searched high and low for those experts when I was first deconverting from Christianity.  That information needs to be easier to find and a more prominent part of the public discussion about morality, not tucked away in the atheism section of the bookstore or on Point of Inquiry podcasts.

Maybe, with someone as visible as Sam Harris talking about this, that will happen sooner, rather than later.