There’s that recurring theme with atheists who, wanting to portray religious people as close-minded, intolerant and limited, ask if they think that atheists can be good people, and, alternatively, if atheists can go to heaven.

The answer to this is to first define “good”, and then to define “heaven”, or salvation.

Accepting the most usual definition for “good”, the answer is yes. Most atheistic solutions to ethics are benevolent, tit-for-tat ones, which will be aggressive only if provoked, and even then only in a limited way, in order to deter further provocations. The dynamics of the cold war were essentially an example of two inherently godless camps doing self-serving things and thus avoiding any widespread violence and evil. There are, of course, very evil atheistic ethical frameworks, which we can see in the history of the age of enlightenment and socialism, so let’s not delude ourselves: atheism is actually wide open to bad ethical choices if they are seen as reasonable and self-serving.

The answer to the third question, whether atheists can go to heaven, is more difficult. If you define heaven as a state of permanent, eternal union with God, then my answer is a decisive “no”, because an atheist simply doesn’t have the kind of internal urge that makes one explore everything related to God because all his motivations drive him there, as if everything depends on it. If you really want God, you will find him, and then I can be quite certain that you’ll go to heaven when you die. If, as atheists often proudly say, you feel no need for God, you won’t go to heaven because what you are looking for is not in heaven. It’s that simple. You may now answer that it’s not right, but my response is that it’s exactly right, and it wouldn’t be right to put you in heaven so that you can annoy saints and angels with your sarcastic remarks about how stupid they are to love God so blindly when you see nothing special about Him. Since you see nothing special about God and nothing attractive about heaven, get the fuck out. It’s only logical.

Since you don’t need God anyway, you won’t be missing out on anything, apparently.