Morality without God?  This was the question we discussed in last month's meeting of my atheist discussion group.  What do you think?  Can we be moral without God?
     indeed, we can.  We humans are moral animals.  That's not the issue.  The issue is rather whether we can develop standards of right and wrong in the absence of a belief in God.
     The answer is that we can.  What everyone in the group acknowledged, however, is that, our intellects notwithstanding, we will never really know what is right and wrong.  We're defining right and wrong with our standards of, well, right and wrong.  We're an issue unto ourselves.
     Although this has worked fairly well for humanity to this point, it is a facade of who we are.  Are we just flesh and blood beings who tell each other who we are?  Or are we flesh and blood beings whose deepest meaning is not something we define ourselves?  Put another way, are we circular or open-ended?
     If we say that, well, of course it's the latter, we come to recognize what it means to be genuinely free.
     It's hard to be free, free to do anything, if all we have is ourselves to know.
     Stay tuned for next month:  our discussion will continue.