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Honestly the whole "if there's no god then how do you know right from wrong" argument is astounding to me, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. -- Penn Jillette
Not only that, there's still laws to consider
When someone tells you who they are believe them
Hell, I'm not even an atheist, but if someone actually came up to me with this kind of shit, I'd run as fast as I could. Like, why would you want to rape or murder in the first place? If you need to be threathened with eternal torture in order to be a good person, then maybe you're not a good person.
Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?
Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths...
This right here is the answer. Religion was an effective way to control many psychopaths. Very useful before there was an effective legal system and police force.
"So what you're saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you're not a murdering rapist pedophile?"
I feel like this question is often pulled up in these conversations and it's rather disingenuous.
Or rather it is taken disingenuously.
This question is not meant to say that if you didn't have Jesus you would be a sadistic cannibal sociopath.
This question comes from the idea that what is God is good, and therefore if you don't have God, you can't possibly know what is good in a true and eternal fundamental sense, far beyond simple right and wrong.
Because if you think about it, if there is a God, then the universe and everything in it belongs to them, right?
And whatever they decide is good for their universe is the absolute barometric truth of what is good, right?
But far too often people are not able to encapsulate that thought and communicate it effectively when talking to people who are outside of their circles and areas of specialized knowledge, and therefore something gets lost in the translation even though the language stays the same.
This is a common issue in any field that gets excessively specialized, and it is typically exacerbated by the people who are inside the field, but not so far advanced into the field that they are aware of those pitfalls and how to navigate them.
So yeah, they're not saying if it wasn't for God they would rape and murder and kill and exploit. They're saying that because of God they have a concept of something that is eternally true regardless of your individual impression of it, And if there was no God, there would be no thing like that in existence.
Honestly, I think it is disingenuous, and the argument is loaded. Namely, if a believer does effectively communicate the notion that God has some universal, eternally-true standard of morality, then the person making the argument can spring the trap:
If that standard of morality exists, we don't know it. God hasn't told us. The Bible is very definitely, historically the word of mankind. The standards it espouses have been relentlessly fought over by different religious factions with their own interpretations, and what's more, they're internally self-contradictory.
The idea that religious people need the threat of hellfire to behave just doesn't stand to scrutiny, since so many of them have no problems professing an interpretation of God's morality to justify whatever behavior they want.
The sad thing is, all of the nuance aside, the answer is very simple.
If there is a good place, the good people will go there. If there is a bad place, the bad people will go there. If there is no place, we all will go there.
Even a child can understand, right?
"The Kingdom of heaven is within you." So the Kingdom of hell, too. "Ye shall tell a tree by the fruit it bear" so maybe what is manifest is what the collective sub/consciousness has created within them. Plus, things in theory seldom look exactly like what we envision. We are humans, we forget it don't know about every single variable that either already exists or can arise.
But this is largely based on the kabbalist understanding of God, and I'm just beginning to scratch beyond the surface layer of wax, which is thick for reasons. Watching things play out around me also makes me understand how and why things became occulted (hidden).
Otoh, "free will" runs smack into constraints, natural and imposed. But that's not much different than cells in a petri dish or in a human host, maybe.
Idk it's early and I'm just waking up.
But here's the thing, even if there is a God we all agree he's not communicating. If you believe in the Bible then you have a set of rules given by him, but most of them don't apply anymore. So it's very pick and choose even for people who believe in God. Therefore it's disingenuous to claim there wouldn't be a distinction from good and evil without God, when you can't agree among yourselves what is good and what is evil. At the end of the day, even IF God existed and IF the bible was his written word, you have to choose between slavery being okay or shrimps being evil, there's no in-between, either those are the rules or they aren't, if those are the rules then eating shrimp is evil just like murdering, cutting your beard, laying with another man or wearing mixed fabric clothes, all sins, all equally bad. If those are not the rules then how do you know what's good? How do you know what God thinks is good? What's the point of the Bible if you're not accepting the rules there?
At the end of the day everyone has their own morality, and that's easily demonstrable, pick two people from the same religion and ask them questions on morally ambiguous things until they disagree. If their morality was indeed given by a single entity it would be unique. That's not the case, therefore their morality doesn't come from the same entity, therefore they also don't know right from wrong because of religion.