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What’s funny is that they are ignoring their own dogma. If you can’t be saved without Jesus, it seems unlikely that you can, in fact, be good without god. It seems like they are just reacting. How original.

First, … who cares? The definition of “saved” is limited to a small subset of christians, so that sign probably offends many mainstream christians, catholics, not to mention jews and muslims.

It’s important to be “good” and treat other people well because other people on this planet really exist. It doesn’t matter if you’re “saved” because there’s no such thing as god or heaven so it’s just a pointless waste of time.

And before I get some stupid comment, that’s my real name. Sorry. Ironic, isn’t it?

“Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one
who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”

To understand human morality, and its origins, you can’t put aside the issues of evolution, human origins, or the fact that humans make gods. The latter, not least because it is asserted, ( i assume by you) that god gives us rules – if for no other reason then we are forced to discuss why thinking this is a bad idea.

Hence the bus sign and the optimism of those who approve of it, that the God idea rattling around in your head, will go the way of the Roman belief in Zeus.

Humans evolved, morality evolved. You are thinking with a brain that is evolved. You seem to think that your brain can send off thoughts that are “pleasing” to the creator of the universe. This is, simply put, delusional.

Evolutionary theory is the framework for thinking about life, and hence, ourselves. Doing otherwise is intellectually forlorn. Just consult any ancient text.

You make the same infantile mistake that Jesus does when he gives advice about how to think about “enemies”, first, let me say that the use of the word “enemies” is foolish in itself.

It is important to think why you are at odds with others. Do they wish to hurt you, or is your disagreement over something like politics, etc … in thinking about what is moral, these kinds of details matter. Morality is constant work. You can’t just say, there are the commandments, we’re done here and wash your hands of the agony that life’s choices constantly provide.

Most religious people I know are invested in the avoidance of the difficult moral questions, using God and or tradition to take shortcut to what they are comfortable is the right answer.

When my wife and I aborted her first pregnancy, or when my father killed others in combat, it wasn’t because we were bad – it was because we felt had to pick between things we wanted, her career, and when to start a family, the sovereign interests of our country.

I’m not saying that these things are without moral significance, it is just that feeling like there are bright lines based on the certainty that we know “the will of God”, or that as Jesus says, there is a promise of eternal life in exchange for holding certain opinions. These are primitive ways to approach ethics and think about the choices we make.

In Matthew, we see Jesus doing the same thing that you do, or perhaps you do it because of Matthew, and accept the premise that there is a dichotomous world. I hope you’ll concede that in between love, and enmity, lie a range of emotions – you (and Jesus) seem to offer the false choice of one or the other.

Surely it is prudent to consider refusing to take revenge, for obviously, revenge sets us in a vicious cycle – just go look at life in systems that are officially governed by absolute religious systems – but that isn’t what Jesus is saying – he says, plainly, “love your enemies” . That is just bad advice.

If there were people who really did love those who wronged them, they would in essence offer a premium for the crime – it is incumbent on us to live in such a way that there are real consequences for “hurting others”.

So what can we do as we come to terms with the fact that the books that religious people call the word of god are, on one hand full of things that repulse us today, and even at their best, poorly constructed and simplistic (eg … mat 5, love your enemies)?

We can do what have done – as creatures capable of moral and ethical thinking. We can use our abilities of thought, reason, and communication (even ads on buses). We can encourage people like yourself to put down ideas that have been shown to be obsolete and encourage the adoption of new ideas that are better.

We can except that our emotions are indeed often at odds with reason and our best interests, and we can learn to check our emotions with the tools of science, statistics and critical thinking. We can grow up and stop acting like children, clinging to the howlingly ignorant preachments of men who lived before we understood things like the germ theory of disease.

In doing this, we have to accept that we live in a web of complex relationships, experienceing a range of affinity and repulsion – this is called “life”.

But perhaps more importantly, we need to accept that the only source of love we know about in the universe is human empathy – projecting our good qualities on cosmos. Abandoning the argument that we take moral and ethical insights from ignorant pleadings of men from ancient Palestine, or accepting that that their thoughts provide little in the way of important principles on which to base our opinions or habits, should not be difficult.