Living a good life without God is a bit like playing football without a ball. There´s just no point. If there were no God, there would be no point in being good since the only possible reason for being good is to be like God. Without God at the center, morality arguments very quickly fall apart. For instance, atheists find it impossible to agree on an absolute system of goodness and can only debate varying degrees of relative goodness.
We have effectively been living for the last thirty years in the west without God. In His place, we have constructed several differing morality guides. The first and most powerful is morality based on profit. We tend to all agree that as long as something generates a profit, it must be a good thing. But when the consequences of these actions result in misery and destruction, we are unable to accept that there is a link between our profit-related actions and bad things.
Having money as a substitute for God very quickly leads to corruption
Corruption occurs at the highest levels, in government, in the police, and the law courts. Then it spreads to all our commercial enterprises and infects the press. Then any form of respect for leadership and authority is lost, and finally, ordinary people become corrupted. The level of corruption inherent in a society can be assessed by viewing its forms of entertainment. A society´s values are reflected in the way it spends its leisure time.
Our leisure time has also been corrupted by another form of deity, the God of lust
While many good people fought hard to liberate society, we as a society have abused those freedoms. By replacing God with a fondness for sex and lasciviousness we have constructed yet another variable mode of morality, one that says it is okay to be free and easy with our bodies. This sort of morality leads to the break up of the family.
Being happy with God in our lives does not mean we have to give up those things which make life fun
There are many positive things in the Bible about money and sex. But trying to lead a good life without God means that the edges become blurred. Who we respect is wrapped up in what we believe. Our idols today may have dubious moral values, but we love them no less for it. They may be atheists, but we live in a liberal culture that accepts atheism as a legitimate belief system, despite the corruption which spreads in the absence of God. Living a good life becomes difficult when it is impossible to define goodness.
Without reference to God, we lose touch with the mysticism of God and lose sight of what it is to follow God´s way
God´s way is the best way forward and the only hope for our world, but we prefer to go it alone. True happiness is God-ordained and without God we have only money and lust as our compass points for success. But real success is achieving the best that God has planned for us. This might mean helping people we would not otherwise have deemed worthy of our help. It may mean choosing a career that we would not have dreamed of. It may mean doing things that are not necessarily agreeable. It may even mean parting with cash instead of piling it up.
We cannot possibly know what is going to make us happy in the future, because we do not know what the future holds. God does. We only know what makes us happy this minute, but sometimes, and more often than we know, these short term pleasures can only lead to our own self-destruction and ultimately the decomposition of the society we live in. Society without goodness is a stark and miserable place. By putting God back at the centre of our actions we can restore a healthy and liberating sense of goodness that will guide us out of darkness. A good life in a dark place is soon strangled out of existence.
