First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.
Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.)
Scientism can’t avoid nihilism. We need to make the best of it. For our own self-respect, we need to show that nihilism doesn’t have the three problems just mentioned—no grounds to condemn Hitler, lots of reasons for other people to distrust us, and even reasons why no one should trust anyone else. We need to be convinced that these unacceptable outcomes are not ones that atheism and scientism are committed to. Such outcomes would be more than merely a public relations nightmare for scientism. They might prevent us from swallowing nihilism ourselves, and that would start unraveling scientism.
To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount. Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.
- A.Rosenberg, The Atheist Guide to Reality, ch.5
The religious have never been forceful enough in pushing back against the argument that their political views are bad for women. Christianity affords women their deserved respect for the role they play, atheism offers them animalism.
Not an atheist, but I am honest. This entire article is based on a woman coming forward *five*years* after the fact, accusing a renown skeptic to getting her drunk to take advantage of her. There have been several incidents where feminists have played the ‘rape card’ with ZERO evidence, tried to ruin a man’s reputation, then cried when the court of public opinion declined to ruin him and then screamed ‘misogyny!’
This ‘anti-woman’ thing is a fight with feminism vs. atheism because the whiny little girls want to take over the atheist movement and make it part of their PC BS and the larger movement isn’t having it.
Here’s an article written about the incident that tries to do just that, but does hit the salient points.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/markoppenheimer/will-misogyny-bring-down-the-atheist-movement#2iq1jmg
(There are five parts to the following series, if anyone’s interested. You can find it on thunderfoot’s youtube page. Here’s part one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKKQdJR7F_I
As usual, anyone who doesn’t swallow feminism’s dogma is labeled a misogynist and attacked relentlessly.
I’ve got a lot of issues with atheism, but not cooperating with PC feminist ideology is not one of them. (I hate feminism MUCH more than I’m at all concerned about atheism.)
So, atheism is evolving into Islam?
The buzzfeed article is so interesting. A self professed group “comprising atheists, agnostics, debunkers of pseudoscience, and others promoting rationalism over superstition, and reason over religion” would be having a family feud so similar, in so many ways, to the religious family feud.
That is what you call irony.
What’s funny is atheists like to claim they’re all rationality and logic. But their worldview ultimately is an evolutionary worldview. And their worldview ultimately declares belief in spontaneous generation, that life sprang from lifeless chemicals. But that is a faith statement, since there’s zero scientific evidence for life springing from lifeless chemicals.
Even the most “simple” single-celled organism is stupendously complex, such that it’s laughable to claim spontaneous generation as a fact. Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation a century ago with the Law of Biogenesis. Even the production of a single usable protein via random processes has been likened to a solar system full of blind men all simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. And that “simple” single-celled organism has dozens of them, as well as organelles, cytoplasm, a nucleus complete with DNA and a variably permeable cell membrane. Yet they have faith (and zero scientific evidence) that all that created itself!