I thought that if I became an agnostic I would have no grounds for ethical behavior. I’d have no moral compass. And I thought that that would probably lead to become a completely licentious reprobate. But as it turns out, that’s completely wrong. I think I actually have more of a sense of the meaning of life now than I ever had as a believer. There are lots of reasons to behave ethically. I think many of us are simply hardwired to want to love our neighbor as ourselves. And to try and do unto others as we’d want them to do unto us. And I think that since life is all there is – this life is it, that after we die we no longer exist – that we should grab life for everything that it can give us. And we should live life to it’s fullest and should enjoy it as much as we can because this is not a dry run for something else. This is it and we should help other people who are suffering now so they too can enjoy life. And so, in fact, my giving up on the sense of an afterlife has made this life for me much more meaningful.
From Bart Ehrman, author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them), speaking to Terry Gross last week on Fresh Air.
In his book, Ehrman says there are irreconcilable differences among the gospels. Ehrman discusses those differences, and what they tell us about Christianity, in that Fresh Air interview.