Can one be good with God?

Can one be good with god?

First my use here of this question is not to encourage or presume prejudice and bigotry against certain theists. Still it is a legitimate question to ask.

One answer is trivially yes but only in spite of god not because of god. That is people read in what they want and so they could read in a decent set of moral values or anything else and claim it came from god. One issue is that this could be "anything else". They could just as easily get a supposed independent confirmation of their prejudices.

The real issue is what is the answer if people try to do it because of god. This is not over whether a god exists nor whether they have the right conception of such a god but rather that it appears to directly conflict with the evidence-based empirical based approach any other remotely plausible moral theory. Has anyone ever been moral because of god?

There are quite a few Christians I have come across, more online than face to face, who argue that is their Christian beliefs that have saved them. Prior to getting this religion they were "sinners" - usually addicts or prostitutes and criminals or some equivalent combination. I certainly would not want to disavow them of their beliefs, if this led them to return to their old ways, which would not help them nor anyone else. Still what Christianity serves here is a useful fiction that enables some to be better people than would have been otherwise. However there are many belief systems that could do this and not all require a god belief. It could just as easily happen with other non-theistic religions such as Advaita, Zen, Taoism or Buddhism. It does not have to be a religion it could be Humanism for example.

Such useful fictions work based on their prior life experiences including propaganda and indoctrination - whether it succeeded in the past or failed. Consequently different people will respond to different useful fictions. So it is not surprising that many have found solace in Christianity since it has such a dominant effect on the upbringing of many children - even if it fails to take hold when they were younger.

The real issue here is to what extent they were mis-educated morally when they were younger as a result of thinking that religion and morality are necessarily related - a fiction and fallacy promoted by many religions. Surely to the degree that this is pervasive in one's upbringing, this contributes to a misunderstanding of what it is to be moral, it supports a lack of moral education, - quite the opposite of many Christina claim's to provide a moral education. It is a deceit, making people think they cannot be moral without the crutch of the church. This serves to produces moral cripples. How many of those who fell on hard times and were "saved" were the product of such miseducation in the first place?

I can only only speculate on such relations but this is certainly supported by the numerous correlation studies that objectively show the degree of religiosity is correlated with social ills. Could it be that a causative factor in this relation is due to the moral miseducation and the attempt by popular strands of Christianity to produce moral cripples, who when not reliant on the crutch of the church, mistakenly think anything goes and eventually suffer the consequences?

So, yes, some people have become moral - better members of a civilised and shared society because of their god beliefs but not because of god per se. However would society not be better off if people had better moral beliefs to start with, then they would have needed to resort to mistaken god beliefs to sort themselves out nor indeed find out that it was partly those mistaken god beleifs that helped them get into trouble in the first place?

Once one explores the question of "can one be good with God" without prejudgement, one realises the problem in asking "can one be good without God". Both are misleading questions. The one I asked here going to negate the effect of asking the more popular variant. The proper question is more simply "can one be good?" - what is required in general. History and philosophy has more than amply demonstrated that belief in a god, or not, is not required. As long as enough people think that asking "can one be good without god" is a legitimate question (ignoring the prejudice often behind such a question), surely one has to ask is "that religion the disease it is trying to cure"?