If there is no immortality, why shouldn’t all things be permitted?

courtesy of jesusandmo.net

As a non-believer, I believe that without the existence of god all things should be permitted. Morality has always existed based on the dogmas that religion laid out for us in order to place certain values on certain human aspects. Without this adherence to a moralistic dogma I am now free to act in an openly amoral way.

Now, I’m not referring to acts that would constitute an illegality, rather, let’s just focus on those decisions that a person makes that would construct his or her own social/emotional framework. Love, compassion, mercy, kindness, i.e. all of the values and virtues a man can posses. All of morality is now useless without god.

At this point I would hope that someone would have picked up on the sarcasm. And more to the point, I would hope that theists who claim this line from The Brothers Karamazov use it as a throw away comment. I have found no scriptual relevance to this supposition yet the glib claims are frequently seen. The absurdity of this baffles me. Conversely, I do not believe that theists’ morality is solely determined by its scriptural mandates.

"If man has been kicked up out of that which is only impersonal by chance, then those things that make him man-hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication-are ultimately unfulfillableand thus meaningless."
—Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There

Wow. Just wow.

Unless morality is used as god’s dangling carrot – which I suspect it is--- how does the soul’s (for a lack of a better word) final destination dictate whether or not a moral compass existed during it’s mortal life?

I will leave this open for discussion – the Texas game is about to come on.