Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
What!!!?? I can’t be selfish and immoral just because I’m an atheist? What a scam. That tears it. I’m going back to God.
Quite apart from evolution, there are ways to act that add to everyone’s prosperity…and ways that emphatically don’t. And we have tens of thousands of years of historic case studies to guide us.
Re: dmabus
Godlessness might not neccessarily lead to immorality, but apparently the internet is an excuse to be an idiot for some people 🙁
Not only is it possible to be moral without religion, it’s easy!
It’s not like when I became an atheist I suddenly thought “Oh wow! Now I can kill people I don’t like and rape women I find attractive but who won’t go on a date with me.”
If anything, it occurred to me that the god of the Bible, if it actually existed, didn’t even live up to the standards of morality that Christianity purported to offer. In other words, I gradually became an atheist in part because morality mattered to me, not because it didn’t.
@EatenByCthulhu: The one that always gets me is how people say, “Well, why don’t you kill and steal?” as if, just by lacking belief in divine authority, one immediately forgets all about the presence of earthly authority. Even if you wanted to be immoral with impunity, God is not your first hurdle – the cops are.
They also forget that there are a lot of people who has never been believers. How did I manage to get it to 40 without ever stealing or killing… I wonder?? Not all people turn atheists, they’ve always been. I guess those people just start with killing their neighbors at the age of 5 or something…
The global atheist conspiracy works tirelessly to keep the immoral acts of atheists hidden.
See my essay “Atheist Foundations of Ethics” at
http://civic.bev.net/atheistsnrv/articles/definition.html