God's problem - my lecture at the Brock University Conference on World Religions

On April 21, I delivered the open talk at Brock University's annual conference on world religions, with year's theme being "the problem of evil." The following is the full text of my lecture, which was abridged during the actual event due to time constraints.

God’s Problem: When religion fails to answer the question of evil and suffering.

By Grant LaFleche

I may well be the oddest choice to present the opening talk on a conference about world religions.

This is not because I have no interest in the subject. Quite the opposite in fact. But rather because unlike every other speaker you will hear over the next two days, I don't believe in any of it. I'm an atheist, which means I don't believe the supernatural claims of religion are true. But even more than that, I am not just an atheist but also an anti-theist - which is to say that I am rather glad it isn't true. There are atheists who will say they wished they had the faith to believe in a god, or to believe the vision of the world as laid out in holy scriptures where true, but they just cannot believe it. This is decidedly not the case with me. As I say, I am rather glad it isn't true and if it were I am convinced we would all be the poorer for it.

Unlike the my colleagues who will take this stage after me, I will not tell you what a particular god wants. I make no claim to be able to offer some ultimate answer to the meaning of life or the nature of the universe which we inhabit. Like all legends and myths, religions say a great deal not about the nature of the universe, but about human nature. About those who wrote the scriptures and those who believe it.

So I want to begin today by talking about a legend you'll know well, a modern myth, about a saint in the world’s worst slums. A woman, so the story goes, so filled with the light of the divine that she devoted her life to working with the poorest of the poor, the most destitute and wretched of the human condition. She did so gladly and so selflessly that many believe Mother Teresa was a living example of the omni-benevolence of god and evidence of the affirming power of faith.

It’s a nice tale, isn’t it? But legends are tricky things and as Nehur said, “facts are facts and they do not disappear on account of your likes.” And the facts about Mother Teresa’s work in the Calcutta slums tell a different tale than her legend.


As Christopher Hitchens so clearly demonstrates, Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend of poverty. She believed that the more one suffered, the closer one is to Jesus. Her order raised millions, but built no hospital nor improved her own hospices, enacted no programs to put an end to the horrid conditions that lead to many to live such wretched lives. Instead, she gave them a place to die – a place where medical science was shunned, hypodermic needles reused by running them under cold water and people died from treatable illnesses. Her theology, rooted in a very Catholic idea of the “mystery” and utility of suffering, required these poor people remains poor, ignorant and sick.


“I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share with the passion of Christ,” she once told a journalist. “I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” Only one blinded by theology could make so wicked a pronouncement. Only credulity can make one believe it to be true.

How can anyone look into the face of an impoverished, dying person and say what they see is a good thing? It is not that Teresa was intentionally cruel. It is that she was utterly removed from the human condition by her faith’s inability to cope with the reality of human suffering. In some ways, she was a victim of hundreds of years of failure by theological and philosophical authorities to resolve what is sometimes called “the problem of evil.”

It is an old theological problem, one that predates the supposed birth of Jesus, and it asks a simple question: if there is an all powerful, all wise, all loving god that cares for mankind, why is there so much evil in the world? Why are human beings beset with so much suffering? The late novelist Joseph Heller described this enduring contradiction in Catch-22, when his sardonic hero John Yossarian gets into an argument with his lover about being thankful to god:

“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”
“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?”
“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”
“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!”

The problem of evil was perhaps first put by a Greek thinker some 500 years before the birth of Jesus. Although Epicurus’ simple paradox lacks Heller’s singular wit, it remains as powerful and as unanswered today as it did when it was first posed:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

As the philosopher David Hume would note centuries later, “God’s power is infinite. Whatever he wills is executed but neither man nor other animals is happy. Therefore he does not will their happiness. Epicurus’ questions are yet unanswered….”

Attempts to resolve Epicurus’ riddle have occupied theologians since the dawn of the Christian era, and I submit have failed utterly. You will, through the course of this conference likely hear many of them. Free will is the usual fall back position – humans suffer because humans choose to inflict suffering. Great – except it is difficult to connect free will to an earthquake, flood or viral epidemic.

Others will claim original sin is the source of what ails us. Except we know there was no Adam and Eve that spawned the species – as any biologist can tell you, if there is only one mating pair of a mammalian species left, that species will quickly die out as inbred genetic defectives. In any case, condemning an entire species for the alleged crimes of two people is unjust and unloving by definition.

Still others attempt to say that god will eventually take care of evil after a bloody apocalypse in which man kind is judged. Fantastic, except that does nothing for those who have been ravaged by cancers or killed in wars. This also suggests, if true, a certain capriciousness and feckless morality to god. He could have prevented the deaths of six million Jews during the Holocaust, or other atrocities, but says instead “Ah, I’ll get around do something about this eventually.”

To make this point clear, let’s conduct a quick thought experiment. Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in front of you falls over from a heart attack. You are armed with a cell phone can with a call to 911 can save his life. Or you can walk away with the promise that at some point in the future, you’ll make a sizable donation to the Heart and Stroke foundation. The moral choice is obvious.

Others have simply abandoned the standard arguments, throw up their hands and say god MIGHT have a reason for letting horrors visit themselves upon mankind, but we just don’t know. And since we don’t know the mind of god, the problem of evil therefore solved. Well, this line is simply an appeal to ignorance to avoid the central question and a rephrasing of “god works in mysterious ways.” And we know what Yosarrian thought about that.

Some take Epicurus’s riddle to be such a damning argument as to demolish the very notion that an all powerful, all loving god even exists. That may be so, although on it’s own it does not dispense with the notion of any god, merely those purported to be all powerful, all knowing and all loving gods. It’s the fantastic dearth of evidence to back up the supernatural claims made by theistic religions is more than sufficient to dismiss them.

Indeed, it stretches credulity to accept the notion of god as Judaism, Christianity and Islam would have us believe. To borrow from Christopher Hitchens, what these religions are asking us to believe this: We know that as a species, human beings have been on this planet for between 100,000 and 200,000 years. If we use the lower figure and say 100,000 years, what the Abrahamic faiths would have us believe is that for 96,000 years or so the human condition was as Hobbes would describe it: nasty, brutish and short. We are killed by bacteria and viruses we don’t know are there, by weather and natural calamities we have no understanding off. Women routinely die in childbirth and life expectancy is less than 25 years. This is to say nothing of what people do to each other for food or land. Slowly over this period, however, by the sweat and toil of people, rise great civilizations in China, in India and in Greece. After all this, heaven decides it's time to intervene. And it does so consistently to illiterate, stupefied peasants in the middle east, rather than in part of the world where the message could be spread.

Indeed, the idea that god is all loving is undone not merely by critical examination, nor by Epicurus’s razor like paradox, but by the religious texts themselves.

In the Old Testament, for example, God murders often and in great numbers. He orders several ethnic cleansings, including a standing order to wipe out the town of any people who dare suggest to the Hebrews that they follow another god. He orders a father to murder his own son as test of loyalty and even personally commits genocide and ecocide on a global level. My own personal favorite is when god orders up a couple of nasty bears to tear 43 children apart for calling a bald man has no hair. Even if taken as metaphor, these are not stories about love, but about an uncontrollable, petty rage that would make even Zeus blush. Were such a god to actually exist, it would not be a creature to bow down to, but to openly oppose on basic notions of justice and human solidarity.

Even in the New Testament we see the contradiction continue. It is only in the New Testament that we are introduced to the utterly immoral concept of hell, where one can be tortured forever for rejecting god’s “love.” Where “salvation” comes in the form of a bloody human sacrifice that any of us would feel duty bound to stop if we had been there. It is made worse because the crucifixion would rob us of personal responsibility, upon which all ethics must be based, in favor of vicarious redemption. Indeed, I openly reject the “sacrifice” of Jesus. I would want no part of it, were it to be true, because I reject the notion that someone has to die for my alleged crimes.

However, as it seems on the weight of evidence obvious there is no reason to accept these claims about a god – as self contradictory as they are – why should I or any non-believer actually care about the problem of evil? It’s because the inability to reconcile the concept of god with the reality of suffering and evil leads, in far too many cases, to morally and ethically reprehensible behavior.

The most obvious results can be seen in the middle east, where honor killings still result the horrific deaths of innocent people, particularly women, for violations of religious laws. In parts of the Muslim world apostasy remains a capital offense. In Afghanistan, Muslim clerics recently sentenced a young couple to death for eloping contrary to their religious edicts. The growing imposition of the Sharia law in Afghanistan has resulted in a law making martial rape legal. You see the point. Only when one’s views are so utterly removed from the reality of human suffering can one seriously make a claim that a wife must provide sex to her husband upon demand. Some niceties do exist, however, in the minds of gruesome Muslim clerics with little sense of compassion. One claims that a wife can say no - but if she does then her husband has the right to starve her.

But the western world should not be so smug. Recently, the Pope declared that condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse in Africa – a continent where more than 25 million have died from the illness and millions more are infected. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt, thanks to science, that condoms have a significant impact in reducing the spread of this virus, yet the church sees fit to ignore this and reject it as a theological issue – which has a significant impact in Africa where the words of a pope carry significant weight. The church’s position is plainly wicked because it contributes to suffering and death. No amount of declaring it to be a faith issue, and thus beyond reproach, can change that.

Where the secular humanist will examine the issue from a utilitarian perspective with an aim of reliving suffering, the church is irrationally dogmatic and dismissive of evidence.

This was powerfully seen only last month in Brazil during the aftermath of the rape of a 9-year-old girl by her step father. He had apparently been abusing her for three years and she ended up pregnant. With twins. At 9-years-old. Her doctors said she would not survive carrying the babies to term, let alone deliver them. Now, in Brazil, abortion is only legal in rape cases and if the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. This qualified as both and the courts granted permission for the procedure.

The church’s reaction to this? Not concern for the suffering this poor child has endured at the hands of a rapist, nor the suffering she will continue to live with for much of her life, but with the abortion. Because the Vatican has declared it a sin. So they petition the courts to deny the abortion claiming the babies could be delivered via c-section. Never mind these bishops are not medical doctors, and are not considering the mortal danger the child is in.

When that failed, the church excommunicated the girl’s mother, lawyers, and doctors. They saved her life, but they have been drummed out of the church. No big deal for non-believers but catastrophic for those who do. They would have thrown the girl out to, but apparently the Vatican as a rule against excommunicating minors.

By the way, just to add insult to injury here – guess who was NOT excommunicated? The rapist step father– the criminal who set off a chain of suffering with his evil actions. A chain the church, because it fails to grasp the reality of suffering – has helped perpetuate.

Human beings suffer. We cannot avoid it. We commit evil acts. This is not because we are made to suffer to allowed to by a divine hand be it caring or capricious. It is because we live on a planet with a shifting crust and powerful weather systems that orbits a start that bathes the planet in radiation – a star that will eventually burn itself out and take this entire planet with it.

We suffer because we are a product of an unguided evolutionary process that shapes all life on this planet, one that does not work from blueprints, but jury gigs systems from the materials at hand. That life can be benign, like a tree, or lethal, like insects that eat other organisms from the inside out. In our case we continue to carry what Darwin called the lowly stamp of our origins. For all our intelligence and brilliance we are still at the mercy of urges, defects, and instincts. And yes, we suffer because of our choices.

How do we best respond to both those forces, both within our control and beyond it? We do so by recognizing not that suffering is part of a grand plan, but something we can combat. We feed the hungry. We provide proper medical care to the sick. We do not fret and worry about the destination of souls or the hereafter. We help each other in the here and now.

Nor do we treat evil as something divine or that exists with a greater moral justification we just don’t understand. We fight it. We certainly do not follow the words of Jesus who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, counsels us to “not resist and evil person.” This hopelessly naive view would allow the Hitlers and Osama Bin Laden’s of history to burn civilization to the ground. Or to put this another way: the choice not to resist evil is a choice to allow it to flourish. In our own life times, the example of the Rwandan genocide should serve as a powerful reminder of what happens when evil is not resisted. Mountains of bodies and rivers of blood are the logical end result of putting Jesus’ doctrine into practice.

The world is not much helped by the suffering of poor people. To truly face human suffering and deal with it as such we must abandon the confused and contradictory theologies that would distance us from it. Rather we can walk the path of a much greater and humane tradition than what is found in the Bible or the Koran. The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone.

It is not perfect. We will stumble. We will fail. But that is almost the point, that we struggle knowing this to be so. And knowing this is the only life we have, that we will cease to exist when we die as we did not exist before we were born, means we have this one and only chance to make a difference.

Grappling with evil and suffering and lending aid to our fellow creatures is something that we, believer and non-believer alike, should gladly do. But never should we treat suffering as mysterious, unassailable or worse, as something good.

Beyond Mere Atheism - An introduction.

I am reluctant to use the word atheist to describe my own unshakable disbelief, and that's not because I'm ashamed, afraid, or even embarrassed, but simply because it seems so self-evidently true to me that there is no god, and giving that conviction a special title somehow dignifies what it denies. After all, we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghosts or witches.
-Jonathan Miller

It goes without saying, I think, that atheism - the intellectual position that one does not accept claims about the nature of life and universe without evidence - is in the midst of something of a revival. Just run the words "Atheist" or "Atheism" through Google news and you'll a host of articles and blogs. These days most are broadsides fired by believers disquieted by a growing number of people who dare not believe. But you'll also find commentary by the Four Horsemen - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, the authors of the books which energized the surge in atheist conviction we see in public.

The most common feature of this so called "New Atheism" is a slashing critique of religion, rooted in a demand for evidence, and those of us inspired by the horsemen have followed their lead. Having dispensed with the supernatural claims of religions, particularly the assumed but unsupported by evidence claim of a god, this critique turns to the moral and ethics of religion - morals and ethics which, more often than not and particularly in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim mode, are found wanting in the extreme.

Believers often rail against this approach. We often ignore their complex and arcane theology, and they see this as a fundamental weakness. If we only understood the 21st century theological views of why god is a loving god, we, the growing legion of new atheists, would understand our arguments are weak. If only we spent more time discussing Aquinas and Augustine, we would see our demand for evidence isn't important.

Nonsense. All the theological gymnastics are fairly useless if evidence,( and by this I mean scientific evidence) the first question, the most important question, cannot be answered. As Cicero put it: the first question in this subject of the nature of the gods is do the gods exist or not? If we conclude, and we do on the basis of evidence, the gods do not exist, then need we worry about god as love, or god as father or god as source of morals? Surely not. What matters is what do those beliefs lead people to do, good or bad.

We need not go upon bended knee and only face the theological questions on the terms believers would have us use. If evidence matters, and we are told we must have regard theological "truths" and statements about the nature of reality, then we can hold those claims up to science, to reason and demand meaningful evidence. And where evidence is lacking, the claim can be (at least provisionally) put aside.

This is what the believer objects to the most. Ironically, they will often (as a scan through google blogs and news will attest) claim that new atheists use a "scientific dogma" and that atheism is a religion.

It is, to be sure, a curious claim. Atheism has no codes. No creeds. No commandments. No pastors, priests or popes. It has no holy texts. No churches, temples or sacred grounds. It has no punishments, real or imagined, for not being an atheist. So where exactly is the "religion" of atheism? I've asked many a believer this question and have yet to hear a reply. I wait still.

And this business about "scientific dogma"? It is an even more through the looking glass argument. What is dogmatic about asking for evidence about claims about the nature of reality? What is dogmatic about requiring evidence to make a conclusion? Surely, there are atheists who do not believe in a god because, well, they just don't. But it is the thrust of the "new" atheism that conclusion is the child of evidence. And it is the evidence that fuels disbelief. To say there is no god simply because you don't believe in one is as empty a statement as a declaration of faith. An examination of evidence is required either way.

And so the screeching apologists attempt to claim that atheism is a religion, making silly references to "secular gods" (again what is a secular god? I've asked this of apologists and never received an answer either.) in an attempt to redefine what atheism is. If they can - as the ill named Discovery Institute and its vapid Intelligent Design movements try to do - define atheism as a religion then they can say "Well see? You have no more evidence than we do! Atheism is just like religion. QED." Unable to face the stark fact that their faith claims exist in a vacuum of evidence, they try this transparent slight of hand to make their case.

Many of us new atheists take some joy in this. And I must confess to enjoying an argument where a theist is left with no recourse but to try and change the definition of science, or ignore logic and evidence when making assertions. But as much as their discomfort might appeal to some our darker impulses, we should temper our glee.

The fact of the matter is that while we argue, some of us with a particular almost evangelical passion, more often than not we are making a case about why religion fails. That is, we are largely anti-theist in our approach. To be sure this is a necessary part of the argument. If one regards religious claims on their own merits, that is to say they are claims about the nature of reality - and claims so powerful we ought to obey the religion that makes them (often with a big OR ELSE attached to it), then we can and should examine said claims through the lens of evidence. If someone says "Gay people should not be allowed to marry because God says so in the Bible," we can see what evidence there is said god exists. If there isn't any, the claim can be dismissed.

However, that only gets us part of the way. Because, like it or not, religion has been a vehicle for morals and ethics for a very long time. This does not mean morality comes from religion. Indeed, one need only point out that what a Christian believed to be moral 300 years ago and what they believe in to moral in 2008 shows the transitory nature of the moral zeitgiest, even among believers who like to imagine their morality is immutable. Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and other moral and ethical systems change with changing times. As Richard Dawkins puts it in the God Delusion:

Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.

But if it is indeed true, as I have argued before, that morals and ethics are largely what we say they are at any given point in time and place - our own evolved moral and ethical leanings notwithstanding - and if it is true that religion has been a delivery system of ethics and morals, and if we say that the metaphysical claims of religion are false, then what kind of morality do we want? What kind of ethics do we want? What kind of society do we want?

You see the point. The revived atheism largely lashes out at religion. However, we aren't doing nearly as good a job at talking about the way things ought to be. If we reject, for very good reasons, the morals of the Christian bible, what then do we accept?

The problem, as I noted above, is that atheism is barely a thing at all. It has no rules, or commandments. And I for one certainly do not think some moves to create atheist "churches" are a good idea. Institutionalized atheism is likely to become the very thing we rail against. Nevertheless, I believe we have to stop allowing the theists to frame moral and ethical arguments for us and start to try to discuss where we think the moral zeitgeist should go.

Most of the time we deal with theists, like Dinesh D'Souza, who blather on about "if there is no god then anything is permissible." This is a rhetorical trick that sets up a false zero sum game of either/or with no other possiblities. For example, one can say that not everything is permissible if we as a society say it isn't. Or that moral standards are set by social contract. The point is, the kind of shallow thesis the likes of D'Souza present limits the entire discussion. And for the most part we allow this to be the way the argument is framed rather than define our turf for ourselves.

So if morality and ethics is what we say it is, then I think its high time we moved beyond mere atheism and say!

So that is what I hope to explore on this blog in the next several related posts, (all to be titled "Beyond mere atheism") and during my Youtubery, in the hopes of engaging others in this discussion. Please feel free to join in.

By way of a short introduction, I think the general guiding principle of a post-Christian, non-theistic morality, should be a kind of utilitarianism that has regard for reducing human suffering while increasing human happiness. This could be, ironically enough, part of my past Buddhist training speaking, but I think we should be advocating the ideas of Epicurus and John Stewart Mill and Jeremy Bentham as both atheistic and necessary modes of moral and ethical thinking.

In the first part of this series of essays "Beyond Mere Atheism" I will start to look at these ideas more closely.

The sound and fury of Dinesh D'Souza - Part 1, continued

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
-Epicurus

When a old university friend of mine first encountered this famous, or infamous if you take your religion seriously, riddle from the Greek philosopher Epicurus on my Facebook page, she was, to put it midly, rather put out.

"This has to be one of the most narrow-minded quotes I've ever read," she said, and went on to explain that the god she believes in gave humans free choice and have the choice of doing what god wants or not. So if we use our free will for evil means, she argued, well there is not point in blaming god is there?

Of course, as passionately as she believes, my friend missed Epicurus's point entirely. He wasn't blaming god for evil. He was pointing out the inescapable paradox of the notion a god that the omniscient, omnipresent creator and ruler of everything in the universe who is also perfectly good. More simply put its the question evil, and Epicurus's little riddle hasn't been, in so far as I know, adequately answered by theists since he first suggested it. Far from blaming a god for evil, Epicurus was pointing out the absurdity of the notion of god (or gods). The very existence of evil makes an "all loving god" a logical contradiction.

This does strike right at the heart of Christianity morality as found in the Bible. "God is love" is a constant refrain among believers who regard the almighty as a benevolent source of all things that are good. Anything that isn't good simply isn't god's doing. Yet the texts themselves reveal a creature for whom the word "good" doesn't really apply even in the most liberal application of the term. True, in the New Testament god, through the figure of Jesus, only threatens humanity with eternal torture for the crime of not believing. But in the Old Testament, god is a bloody figure. He spends a great of his time murdering on a unspeakable scope. He commits global genocide at least once, order the wiping out of entire cities (save for the virgin women which his chosen people get the keep as slaves.) It is these acts of barbarism that would have made even the vicious Zeus flinch, that led Richard Dawkins to write in the God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Now, remember, Christians believe the god who asked Job to murder his son, who personally executed the first born sons of Eygpt, who drowned all life on earth, is the very same "god of love" of the New Testament. Frankly, once you read the Old Testament, and see its blood soaked theology, the claims of the New aren't important. I don't need to know anymore about the character of this god beyond the flippant disregard for human life in stories like Noah's Arc or Exodus.

Still, to play devil's advocate, if you'll forgive the phrase, lets concede for the moment that the Christian god isn't a blood thirsty manic with a desperate need to be worshiped. Lets assume he wouldn't murder anyone. Even then, Epicurus' riddle remains true. Because if god is all powerful and all loving, then he aught to prevent evil. But, if he exists, he doesn't. He allows it to flurish whenever and where it can.

This is a particular problem. For any decent person with even the slightest concern for their fellow bi-pedal mammals knows that a failure to prevent evil or suffering when it is in your means to do so, is an act of evil. If you walked past a person on the street bleeding to death which is the ethical choice? To stop and help or just to walk past? To walk past, to make that omission of action, is in of it itself an act of evil. This is also the god of Christian theology - the loving god with the power to stop evil, but refuses to do so. That is the kind of god that Epicurus called, correctly, malevolent.

Of course, there are comment arguments from theists, most of which revolved the free will argument my friend above offered. But how does free will result in a person being killed by a random lighting strike? Or an earthquake? Or a forest fire? We are at the mercy of natural forces that can, in an eye blink, wipe us out. If one believes the Christian notion of an all powerful ruler of the universe, then god can easily prevent the deaths of innocent people from such things. Yet he does not. This is no different than steeping over a bleeding person on the sidewalk. The lack of action is an act of evil.

Which brings us back to D'Souza's claim that morality cannot exist without god. Yet if you take the texts at their word, god frequently engages in behavior that is anything but moral. The old canard that says "God's morality is not man's", or as I like to put it, "thou shalt not kill unless god commands it," is simply an excuse and is, sententially or not, a justification for every horrible act one person can inflict upon another. The foundation of this morality, the morality that D'Souza would have us believe is the only thing keeping people from riping each other apart, is scrawled in human blood.

Yet in Epicurus we find not just a skeptic about the existence of supernatural dictators. He also offered up a morality and ethic grounded in human happiness - all without the directions of a cosmic king, thank you very much. Epicurus taught that the pursuit of happiness was the highest ethic ideal. Often misunderstood by the theist set as advocating rampant pleasure seeking, Epicurus was suggesting the absence of pain and suffering - a state of being he called ataraxia : a state free from worry and fear. (In fact, he explicitly warned against overindulgence precisely because it would cause suffering) So understand that we we seek pleasure for ourselves, and for others. This is a Greek permutation of what we now call "the golden rule." You do not inflict suffering on others because you do not wish it for yourself.

Epicurus, the great critic of very notion of god or gods (if they did exist, he thought, then they are utterly unconcerned with human affairs) also admitted slaves and women into his school of philosophy - rarity in that time and place - and advocated for a human egalitarianism.

The point behind all this is that D'Souza is correct when he says some Christians behave morality because they believe. But to say that morality is impossible without a god, and in particular without the god he believes in, is ridiculous.

In men such as Plato and even more so with others like Epicurus, we see a clear ethical and moral code that teaches doing good for its own sake, for helping those who need it, and avoiding inflicting harm on others. All done without a reference to cosmic god who is always watching, judging and ready to punish. Rather it is human beings struggling with the contradictions of our nature, and find a way to live what the Greeks would have called "the good life."

Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.
Religious tyranny did domineer.
At length the mighty one of Greece.
Began to assert the liberty of man.

-Lucretius, an ode to Epicurus