Pascal's wager

First off, "good" and "evil" (or "bad") are subjective terms. Religion loves to use those terms for things it likes or dislikes, and most of us do the same. I dislike cruelty, so I'm very strongly inclined to call cruelty evil. Churches have, traditionally, employed the most blood-curdling cruelty against people who refused to accept official dogma. But I'm sure that Ferdinand and Isabela thought that they were doing good when they had people tortured for not being proper Catholics.

The fact that corporations pollute the Earth and governments build nukes to blow it to pieces does not mean that people are inherently evil. It's the result of institutional pressures and a political system that insures that only very egotistical people will come to power. Whether in business, or in government, sensitive people very seldom succeed. It happens, but it's not the norm. So we have economic and political structures that do very great harm, arising from a populace that is not inherently good or bad, but capable of both.

Most people lie. But most people also do kind things. Very very very few people are consistently cruel or consistently kind. Most are cruel at times and kind at other times. If you insist on using the terms "good" and "evil," nearly everybody is good at times and evil at other times. (Though most people claim their bad actions were justified for one reason or another. Humans are very good at finding excuses for actions they would condemn in others.)

Humans are far too complex to claim they're basically good or bad.

But I am aware that Christian dogma says that we're all sinners (i.e. bad) and we must accept a raft of odd beliefs in order to be forgiven the sinfulness we were born into because our thousand-times-great grandparents disobeyed god and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

 

Extraordinary evidence would convince me. If there's a god and he wants me to believe in him, he only needs to show himself in an unambiguous way. Christians (those who believe in proof rather than faith without evidence) always cite all sorts of "evidence" which is totally ambiguous and based on logical fallacies. The Bible is not evidence, it's only testimony by people who lacked the scientific education to rigorously assess their experiences. And the newest parts of it are nearly two thousand years old. And all we have are copies of copies, no originals. And NO copies of Jesus's actual words before the scribes translated them into Greek.

There is not even any weak evidence. Just ancient testimony, and arguments grounded entirely in logical fallacies, such as "The world is so wonderful it must have had a creator."

I agree with this. And it's why I respect the Buddhists so much, even though I don't believe the supernatural parts of their religion. And it's why I respect people like Dorothy Day and her modern-day followers in the Catholic Worker movement. And why I respect atheists who live a good life.

Both good and bad are subjective terms. They have no objective reality. "Good" is whatever seems nice to the speaker; and "bad" is whatever annoys the speaker. That's why we have so much argument about what's good and what's bad. Because the terms themselves have no meaning outside of an individual's psyche. We are born with a powerful sense of right and wrong. It helps us to live as a social species. But the details are purely cultural, learned in childhood, and between cultures they range all over the map. America is a heterogeneous nation composed of many cultures and sub-cultures, so we have a lot of conflict over what's right and what's wrong. Highly homogeneous nations have less conflict.

To me, cruelty is bad and kindness is good. But that's just me. Nobody believes their own cruelty is bad, and lots of people, Christians, atheists, and others, do cruel things, nearly always claiming their actions are justified and therefore good.

Note: I do not claim to be any better than the next person. But I also do not believe I'm any worse than someone who believes in any of the available mythologies. Believing or not believing does not make a person any better or any worse. But some belief systems urge people into cruel actions, and those are what I argue against.