God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress we make in our knowledge or whatever progress we make in our moral knowledge is not coming really from religion. It's coming from the very hard work really of moral philosophy, of trying to ground our moral reasonings.
Rebecca GoldsteinWe become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
Rebecca GoldsteinIn fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.
Rebecca GoldsteinOne of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.
Rebecca GoldsteinOur humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
Rebecca GoldsteinI think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.
Rebecca Goldstein