Posted on 09/30/2015 11:30:21 AM PDT by Heartlander
There are two atheist "memes" (to use a jargon term) that seem to me to be in prima facie conflict. I will not claim to be able to cite chapter and verse showing that the same atheist uses both of these memes. But I'm quite sure that there are atheists out there who have done so.
So these are not exact quotes from anyone but approximate statements that reflect things that I, and I suspect you, dear Reader, have heard and read.
Atheist meme #1: It is offensive to imply that being an atheist is in any way detrimental to being a moral person. Atheists can be just as moral as religious people.
Keep your eye on the ball. The question of what is meant by "just as moral" will be crucial.
Atheist meme #2: The idea that man is in any way special is speciesism derived from religious ideas like the image of God. Once we get rid of those religious concepts we can see that man is just another animal, though a highly evolved one. Man's continuity with the animals means that abortion, euthanasia, killing those in "vegetative states," and even infanticide are all "on the table" for ethical debate. The decision in specific cases should be made on the basis of utilitarian considerations without any notion that human life per se is valuable.
It should be pretty obvious that the proposals in atheist meme #2 are socially radical. They represent a departure from what a lot of people for a long time in Western society have thought of as moral behavior. Yet atheist meme #2 says that, once you are an atheist, you should consider them to be viable options.
Prima facie, this conflicts with atheist meme #1. It's pretty obvious that, if atheist meme #2 is true, atheist meme #1 is false: Atheism does make you a less moral person if atheism leads you to consider doing all those things or even advocating them.
Suppose someone wanted to hold both of these to be true. What could he say? He could try to say that, since the ethical system outlined in atheist meme #2 is actually correct, atheism doesn't really make you less moral. It just leads you to redefine what constitutes morality so that it allows things that previously (traditionally, according to Judeo-Christian morality, etc.) were not allowed.
The problem with that response is that it turns atheist meme #1 into a pointless tautology. If atheist meme #1 has a point in communication, it must be either to reassure people about atheist morals or to shame those who question them. Neither of these ends is served if "moral" in atheist meme #1 could mean "Moral according to norms radically redefined by atheists themselves." If that's the only meaning, atheist meme #1 is compatible with, say, finding that atheists are bank robbers at a much higher rate than the general populace, so long as they are following some atheist redefinition of morality that makes it okay to rob banks. But that would certainly undermine the point (at least if enough people noticed), because then people would decide that atheists qua atheists are less likely to be "nice people."
What this shows is that anyone who trots out atheist meme #1 but also plans to advocate atheist meme #2 is doing a bait and switch. Start by protesting about the morality of atheists. Trust that your audience will be lulled into accepting this claim by the fact that the intellectual atheists you intend to hold up for their consideration aren't right now breaking any laws or personally engaging in any gruesome actions (even if they are quietly, academically advocating them). They look like "nice people." Then later argue for the "enlightened," utilitarian ethics that you actually believe.
I have sometimes wondered, when atheists complain (a la meme #1) that others think they are less moral than theists, what they would say if asked, "What do you think of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia? Is your position on these matters at all influenced by your atheism? If yes, and if I consider your position grossly immoral, then why should you be offended to learn that I consider that your atheism makes you less moral?"
The funny thing is that I actually believe that the true positions on these issues are available by the natural light and hence do not require theism to understand. (Though theism helps. Human beings always find it useful to have more sources of information than strictly necessary.) I examined some of these issues in this essay. In Western society, however, the brand of atheism most commonly held is not some sort of virtuous, Platonic atheism that cleaves to the Good and accesses the natural light but rather some version of naturalism. And that is highly detrimental to moral insight.
I present my readers with the conflict between meme #1 and meme #2 in the hopes that it may be useful, either in talking with atheists or talking to others about atheism.
Three men walking:One man walks up to me, and I ask him to jump. He does.
A second man walks up to me, but different from the first, as he is walking in the air. I ask him, also, to jump. He tries, but cannot, because he is not grounded.
A third man walks up to me, but different from either of the first two, as he is walking on the ground, but doesn’t believe in the ground. He believes the ground does not exist. I ask him to jump too. He does.
<<<<<<>>>>>> Now, when the theist says [to the atheist] you don’t have morality, like I’m saying, you think we are claiming you are the second guy. But you want to say, “No! You idiot! I can jump just fine.” And you can. But we are not saying you are the second guy at all. Rather, we are saying you are the third guy. You have, in actuality and practicality, the correct moral standards from which you CAN jump, and you KNOW you have them.
But the problem remains, and it really is a problem that is delusional. You have the ground, you use the ground, you run and jump and play all day long. But you deny that which is right under your feet even as you are doing it.
Does being an atheist interfere with being moral?
No. Even though atheists won’t admit it our inherent sense of right and wrong are placed in us by God.
Even a cursory study of Quantum Physics would challenge any
Atheist’s non-God religion.
y’gutt’a first define moral
No it does not.
The big question in my mind regarding atheism and morality is in regard to body counts.
In modern times, it seems atheistic regimes have the biggest mass-murder body counts.
But in history, that’s not true. Islam killed 80 million Indians in its conquest of the subcontinent. I think that tops anything that Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot did individually (Mao the Leader with 50 million), though not collectively. Collectively you have to give the body count title to the atheists.
However, going forward, as Islam gets more nuclear weapons, they could easily surpass all that’s gone before.
Yes. Eugenics makes perfect sense if there is no God. It is not a coincidence that it became popular right after Nietzsche.
YES being an atheist interferes with being moral, for to him there are NO consequences for immorality! And without the ABSOLUTE goodness of God as a reference point, there is no way to judge good from evil, any more than one can say that red is a “better” or more “moral” color than blue.
I don’t agree with you. We are not inherently good because we have committed the original sin. That’s why many kids are absolutely evil until they learn differently from their parents. This is actually the belief of liberals. That’s why their crime fighting techniques always end in horrific failure.
Also, how do you explain evil such as ISIS? They actually believe that the atrocities they are perpetrating are approved by Allah. Suicide bombing is good. Beating up your wife is good. If everybody innately knows right from wrong, this wouldn’t happen.
And that’s why when God is kicked out of schools and the ten commandments are taken out of the public square, we find more school shootings, more disrespect, more acceptance of lying as normal, etc.
The athiest believes what (s)he says is right or wrong, not anyone else’s standard. The Christian believes that God determines moral values and reads the Bible to find them. The muslim believes Allah determines appropriate actions in life and therefore kills everyone who disagrees with him or her.
The ground of Christian and Jewish morality is found in the 10 Commandments, which describe what it is to love God and love your fellow man. Athiests skip the first half of the commandments—then they tend to follow (more or less) the 2nd half of the commandments. In denying the ground of love of man, which is love of God, it is no wonder that they erode even love of man....justifying murder (in abortion, euthanasia, & etc.) sexual immorality, theft (see Wallstreet), lying, coveteousness, etc.
Without love of God, you cannot have a solid, lasting love for your fellow humans.
“Religion is the opium of the people” — turning this quote around, most of us would say that Communism was the opium of the people. It pacified and subjugated millions of people even to their own deaths as they were being marched off to the re-education caps or being starved to death under Mao.
The seeming dilemma of “inherrently good” can be solved by a correct definition of evil, which is perverted-good.
When something, or someone, is not as good as they could be, that, in itself, is evil, no matter how relatively good compared to others they are.
Evil is always twisted or perverted good.
People are born evil, selfish beings....not guilty of any crimes yet, just with a sin-nature. Through a disciplined, moral childhood, many bad habits can be ironed out of someone, but our fundamental nature is still flawed—and any flaws, are sin.
Only Jesus Christ, the God-Man, was born without sin—and maintained a sinless life all along.
Probably, because there’s no outside check on your behavior and you can invent your own ‘moral code’.
By their own logic, every atheist is directly responsible for every Christ hating chainsaw wielding maniac who ever killed a bunch of people and sliced them into little pieces.
Which actually happens, the trials and convictions are in the newspapers and everything, but the atheists like to pretend that it’s just a fairy tale because they don’t believe in fairy tales and besides it makes them look stupid.
It appears to me that, to the extent atheists follow Judeo-Christian morality, they are being moral parasites. Atheism taken to its natural conclusion will result in sociopaths. Because, for any altruistic action on their part, one must ask “why?” Altruism on their part ultimately is in spite of their worldview, not because of it.
While indeed morality is a religious idea, it can be subdivided into the western morality of Christendom, and the eastern morality of Asian faiths.
Paramount in Christendom is the idea of the individual, and the morality of the individual, based in unchanging principals in scripture. What was moral in Biblical times is more or less moral today, for people as a whole. But individuals can choose to be more or less moral compared to these ideals. Essentially to this is the idea of forgiveness for immorality, accompanied by the offer to at least try to be more moral.
In the Asian faiths, the individual is far less important, and they are thought of in respect to their family, their village, their cast and class. So in past, for example, if an individual offends the emperor, his entire village might be put to the sword. So for them, morality is thought of as a collective thing.
The outgrowth of this eastern morality is difficult for westerners to grasp, but here is a modern example of it.
When Russia was in Afghanistan, it realized that families of the fighters were supporting them. So the Russians decided to put them in internment camps, behind fences, and with armed guards. But the Afghan women and children were still problematic, and took more guards than the Russians wanted to use, so they had an idea.
Dig shallow slit trenches, line them with plastic, and pour in water with weakened blister chemical agent. Then make the women and children walk the length of the trench. It would blister their feet, which would incapacitate them until their skin healed.
Of course, most of the rest of the world was horrified with this idea. But the Russian response was that it was the “humanitarian” thing to do, otherwise “we would have no other choice” but to kill them. A lesson in Russian “humanitarianism”.
Now this is a start point for the huge variation in *religious* based morality. At least in either case, there is at least *consideration* of morality. But what compels any consideration on the part of atheists?
Nothing at all. Like westerners, theirs are lives based in respect for the individual. But they respect no common morality, so their morality is relativistic and whimsical. It is based in their self importance and self pity, both of which can be bottomless pits.
This means that by default, atheists have the morality of “the beasts of the field”. As such they can no more be trusted than can a dachshund be trusted to guard a doughnut on the floor.
Define ‘moral’ BigCinBigD. What is it? Where does it come from? WHO gets to define it? Is it an absolute?
At the end of the day, you can never be sure a random atheist won’t take out a meat clever and chop your head off to steal your bank account. Same for a Muslim.
A Christian or Jew who did that would be considered either insane or evil. An atheist or Muslim would have some excuse.
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