tokezu
Bluelighter
Imagine you wake up tomorrow and by some mysterious circumstance you suddenly know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not God actually exists. If that knowledge vindicates your prior position on the matter, that is of course a comfortable position and nothing really has to change. But what if your assumptions/beliefs about God have been proven wrong to you beyond a shadow of a doubt? So if you believed in God prior to this you wake up knowing he doesn't exist. Or vice versa you didn't believe in God, but now you know that he does exist. (Feel free to substitute 'God' with 'the law of karma' or any other metaphysical concept.)
Would this knowledge change how you conduct yourself in the world? If the definite knowledge of either "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" would change how you conduct yourself, wouldn't that cast a bad light onto you? Say you have always believed in God and because of that you were always nice to people, but now (as some fundamentalist christians would argue) that you realise there is no God you conclude there is no reason not to go out raping and murdering people, so you do just that. Obviously somebody like that has never actually been a good person, they only acted like one because they expected a reward/punishment for their behaviour. The other way around it's the same thing, if a person who is raping and murdering other people stops doing that only because now they know there is going to be a reward/punishment for their behaviour, can you really call that 'becoming a better person'? I don't think so. Of course I am painting a pretty extreme picture here to make the problem clear, but I think it would also apply to a smaller scale.
Obviously I don't know how I would react if woke up tomorrow and suddenly knew. But I certainly hope that either way it wouldn't change a thing about how I live my life, because I try (though I wouldn't claim I always succeed) to live in a way that I could defend regardless of what kind of 'authority' I might be confronted by after death and what their standard for 'good behaviour' might be.
So then, shouldn't it be totally irrelevant for the question of how to conduct yourself whether or not God actually exists? What are your thoughts?
Would this knowledge change how you conduct yourself in the world? If the definite knowledge of either "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" would change how you conduct yourself, wouldn't that cast a bad light onto you? Say you have always believed in God and because of that you were always nice to people, but now (as some fundamentalist christians would argue) that you realise there is no God you conclude there is no reason not to go out raping and murdering people, so you do just that. Obviously somebody like that has never actually been a good person, they only acted like one because they expected a reward/punishment for their behaviour. The other way around it's the same thing, if a person who is raping and murdering other people stops doing that only because now they know there is going to be a reward/punishment for their behaviour, can you really call that 'becoming a better person'? I don't think so. Of course I am painting a pretty extreme picture here to make the problem clear, but I think it would also apply to a smaller scale.
Obviously I don't know how I would react if woke up tomorrow and suddenly knew. But I certainly hope that either way it wouldn't change a thing about how I live my life, because I try (though I wouldn't claim I always succeed) to live in a way that I could defend regardless of what kind of 'authority' I might be confronted by after death and what their standard for 'good behaviour' might be.
So then, shouldn't it be totally irrelevant for the question of how to conduct yourself whether or not God actually exists? What are your thoughts?