Washington Post: Independence Day an Atheist Holiday

Newsbusters ^

[kcvl]

Washington Post reporter outs herself as bisexual while defending her gay marriage profile.

http://www.examiner.com/x-3366-Bisexuality-Examiner~y2009m9d7-Washington-Post-reporter-outs-herself-as-bisexual-while-defending-her-gay-marriage-profile

[mjp]

She defended atheists as misunderstood. "The most common misapprehension they encounter is that they must be immoral - that, lacking the promise or threat of an afterlife, they have no incentive to be good,"

But a legal code with a foundation of atheism, naturalism, and evolution will be based on subjectivism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism.There will be no absolute standard of evalutation of justice.The legal code will be relativistic, arbitrary, and mutable. These all lead to the problem of an unstable system of legal positivism which leads to increase risk of disobedience and increased risk of statism.

[rwa265]

“The trouble with most major holidays in the United States, if you’re an atheist, is that it’s difficult to ignore the ‘holy day’ etymology,”

This is an inaccurate statement. Of the 10 Federal holidays, only Christmas can be truly considered a holy day, that is, a day set aside for religious observance. Most religions do not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holy day. And while January 1 is celebrated as the Solemnity of Mary as Mother of God in the Catholic Church, it is not the same celebration as the secular New Year’s Day.

The other seven holidays have no religious connotation at all, other than maybe praying for those who have died serving our country on Memorial Day.

[mjp]

they believe in kindness for the sake of kindness, making the most of the brief existence they believe humans are allowed

God has revealed his law to mankind generally, through natural law. Every man, even atheists, has some inherent sense of right and wrong. The Apostle John says, "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9). The Apostle Paul says, "For when the Gentiles...do by nature the things contained in the [revealed] law, they ...are a law unto themselves" (Romans 2:14. Christianity teaches that mankind can, to some extent, perceive the will of God, and that this perceived will is the law of nature.

[aruanan]

She defended atheists as misunderstood. "The most common misapprehension they encounter is that they must be immoral - that, lacking the promise or threat of an afterlife, they have no incentive to be good,"

Well, they have only the promise or threat of what they predict their actions may or may not bring them in this life based on their circumstances, what they feel they are due, whom they believe they're dealing with, and what they believe they can get away with; none of these, prediction, analysis of circumstances, sense of entitlement, comparison with others, and then choice of means necessarily has any kind of moral force.

And, given man's penchant for finding a way to do whatever he wants in a way that benefits himself while shifting blame to anybody or anything else and simultaneously excusing or even praising his own actions within the context of whatever moral code in which he finds himself, such a person is less, rather than more, likely to submit himself to the societal moral code because he'll ask why he should allow an amalgam of many human choices to be put in the position of limiting what he himself can see so clearly.

[Mogollon]

Atheists already have their national holiday on April fools day. Per the biblical proverb: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”