Posted on 10/17/2003 4:04:27 PM PDT by TXLibertarian
Excerpted from a longer op-ed. Author discusses the danger of legal proselytizing by a few firebrand secularists. Worth a read, IMHO.
What Atheists Want
By Chris Mooney
....
Unfortunately, in my experience, the U.S. atheist and secularist communities contain a number of activists who are inclined to be combative and in some cases feel positively zestful about offending the religious. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, easily America's most famous atheist firebrand, wasn't dubbed "the most hated woman in America" for nothing. Despite her landmark 1963 Supreme Court victory in a case concerning the constitutionality of school prayer, O'Hair's pugilistic and insulting public persona hurt atheists a great deal in the long run. A head-on attack on the pledge seems to epitomize the confrontational O'Hair strategy.
....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It is true or it is false. You have repeatedly said you think it false. That leads to an absurdity as I have twice illustrated. Your hang-up is thinking that this obvious fact, which you and everyone else observes regularly, somehow contradicts your deeply held values. It doesn't, or if it does, then your deeply held values need to be rethought.
Rights for an individual are those individual's values for which another individual is willing to alter his behavior in order to avoid conflict.
Your definition is not an absolute statement, thus by your definition human rights are not absolute.
Wrong. My whole point is that these are FACTS of nature. As such, they are the universal absolute aspects of the universe that we are privy to through observation. They are a necessary product of the traits human beings possess. If creatures in another era on another planet possess these natural traits, then rights would develop for them as well. The facts are independent of any human opinion, emotional decision, or stipulated dogma. They are unchangeable as gravity and time.
There are certain people (I needn't go back over the history) who will not alter their behavior
Then they are as commonplace as the trees, the wind, or the wild animals. At any rate, it has no bearing on anything I've said. If they can never or will never change their behavior upon request to avoid conflict, then they are not a part of a relationship relevant to rights.
So if in a given culture the government will not alter it's behavior to avoid conflict over human life, do these people not have a right to life?
There you go again. If you haven't read my past posts, I refer to them now.
YOU: I believe that without God the case for human rights collpases completely. Why? Because if human rights are truly "rights" then they must be based on a set of universal values that are always true, in all places and at all times.
ME: Like 2+2=4 is always true in all places and at all times?
That's right!
So you believe that without god the case for 2+2=4 "collapses completely"?
No, I mean that without the validation of a higher law your judgments mean nothing more than his. So you cannot tell whether someone else is right or wrong without calling on a higher law.
This is easily demonstrated to be false. If someone else tells me, "I am Fred and I am not Fred", then I can tell that he is wrong without calling on an elevated law. The absurdity that my judgements mean nothing more than his ought to be obvious. If his judgement is that I must die, then I gaurantee you my judgement that I should live means a heck of lot more to me than his judgement. I need no higher law for that. I know that I want to live, even without anyone's help.
Sure, you could settle the dispute yourselves, but you would appeal to a higher law than just your opinion - to whit, the property boundary. You could just fight it out, but in that case the person who wins is the strongest, not the most just. Or you could bring in a third party to mediate and agree to go by his judgement - i.e. a higher law.
The property boundary is a higher law? The third party is a higher law? How do you know they are not lower laws? Or laws that are kind of at the same elevation? So you are saying that it is your opinion that the third party is a higher law than my opinion. Well excuse me if I value more of my opinion than your opinion.
Funny that no matter how emotional you get about something, your utterances remain your opinion. Unless you can convey to me through a common observation, something that, for my eyes, I cannot deny, your claim of absolute truth is nothing more to me than "just your opinion".
Sure you can - but you can't be consistent without a law higher than yourself.
I'm glad you used the word "consistent". Maybe you can show me the syllogism that proves that a moral judgement "without a law higher" than the judger is necessarily inconsistent. It is by no means obvious.
I'm sorry, it's not that simple. Sometimes people are able to be peacefully persuaded. Often they are not. I explained my exceptions. I believe they are consistent. I've presented very compelling evidence that people sometimes allow themselves to be peacefully persuaded, and sometimes they require raw force to conform them.
If his judgement is that I must die, then I gaurantee you my judgement that I should live means a heck of lot more to me than his judgement.
Of course you do, and I'm glad to hear it. But your opinion in that instance really means no more than your attackers unless you can call on a higher law to claim that his acts are wrong.
Maybe you can show me the syllogism that proves that a moral judgement "without a law higher" than the judger is necessarily inconsistent.
When a case to trial and a judge renders a judgement, he does so (hopefully) in accordance with a law. He does not offer his "observations" disconnected from a higher law - he follows the law and renders justice accordingly. The judge must call upon the law for his judgments to have any moral meaning at all. Otherwise he is just exercising raw force without any moral judgment to back him up. And that is inconsistent.
It is precisely that simple. It doesn't matter how many exceptions you find, FACT#3 holds. Rights do not apply to those exceptions, it only applies to things with the said properties. The exceptions are irrelevent to rights and they certainly do not contradict the statement of FACT#3.
But your opinion in that instance really means no more than your attackers unless you can call on a higher law
No, my opinion in that instance really means MUCH more to me than my attackers, regardless of any law of any elevation.
ME: Maybe you can show me the syllogism that proves that a moral judgement "without a law higher" than the judger is necessarily inconsistent.
YOU: When a case to trial and a judge renders a judgement, he does so (hopefully) in accordance with a law. He does not offer his "observations" disconnected from a higher law - he follows the law and renders justice accordingly. The judge must call upon the law for his judgments to have any moral meaning at all. Otherwise he is just exercising raw force without any moral judgment to back him up. And that is inconsistent.
It would be better if you would lay this out clearly as a syllogism, because I don't follow you. Your proof of necessity somehow refers to a judge on the bench during a trial? You think that somehow legality sets the standard for morality? Judgement that opposes a law is the same as raw force? And what specifically is the inconsistency?
To you of course it does. But logically and morally it doesn't, because without some outside validation of your opinion it has no more moral legitimacy that your attackers.
Look, fact #3 is not an absolute. I presented evidence of this fact. I continue to maintain that you cannot come to a sense of human rights by simply observing how people interact, and assuming that because some people tend to respect others in certain areas that this constitutes a "right." This changes from culture to culture and from country to country. Thus it is not an absolute.
I mean, in the morning I tiptoe around my wife to keep from waking her up. I am "altering my behavior" to avoid a conflict. Does that mean my wife has an "absolute right" to sleep? No, of course not.
My long-winded analogy of the courtroom was to show that in order to pass moral judgment you need something higher than your own opinions and intellect to be consistent. That was all I was trying to say.
So you cannot condemn as abolutely wrong (the "universal standpoint") the massacring of innocent Jews by Hitler? Please correct me if I am mistaken here.
Just because you want there to be a standard by which you can universally define Hitler's actions as "wrong" does not mean that such a standard exists.
No, you are well aware that such a standard exists. You can't universally condemn mass murder, but you can't bring yourself to shrug it off either.
I could jump up and down and shout, "What's wrong with you, can't you see that $DEITY doesn't want this to happen!?", but I doubt that would be very effective.
Whether it is effective or not has absolutely nothing to do with the question, as you well know. Whether your moral construct allows you to stand on firm moral, logical ground is the issue.
References?
I would daresay that there are countless examples of evangelicals who believe that the Bible is authored by those it claims to be. I would go so far as to say that it is difficult to find someone in conservative evangelical/Catholic circles who does not believe it. All six Southern Baptist seminaries, which are among the largest in the world, a full of professors who believe it. But here are a few references to get you started.
http://www.carm.org/bible/biblewhen.htm
http://www.carm.org/evidence/gospels_written.htm
http://www.equip.org/free/DW035.htm
http://www.equip.org/free/DJ028.htm
I hope that you'll answer my question on 1 John 1:1-2 based on the C.S. Lewis "trichotomy", as you put it.
Ancient Greeks believed that they received messages from the gods through various signs.
You'll have to give me a specific example in order to answer that question. It is possible that they truly received messages, but I would suspect that they would be demonic in origin. In addition, considering that the Greeks gods were little more than amplified humanity, making no attempt to account for sinfulness and redemption of fallen man, it would be diificult to take them seriously.
I still wonder at how people can try to assign belief to people who have no belief. Is it that hard to understand?
Well, at least you are consistent here, which is more than most atheists. I'm sorry but I must be frank here - your viewpoint is absolutely abhorrent and tragically wrong, and if applied writ large to society will lead it into total and complete destruction. Massacring innocent Jews is a crime against God and man.
Since you cannot judge right from wrong, why are you on this website? Why do you care? The fact of the matter is, you do not live consistently by your own assumptions. Despite your inability to condemn the Holocaust, you make absolute judgments of right and wrong all the time. You do this because God has given you a conscience, and you know that there is an absolute Authority.
Nonetheless, I can provide websites that back up my claims.
I'm sure you can. That does not change the historic position of the church, which has been that the Bible is what it says it is. Your claim that "no reputable Bible scholars" believe that the Bible was actually authored by those who claimed to author it is laughable.
What does that have to do with the truth of their existence? Gods only exist if their nature matches what you want them to be?
No, it just makes it much more likely that they are man-created.
To paraphrase a sermon I heard the other day, Christianity is not a religion that man would have invented, even if they could.
Christianity is a religion that is not centered around the works of man, but demands that mankind believe and place their faith in the finished work of someone else; it does not demand rules and rituals and good works, it demands simple faith. It does not rely on human beings ability to "make something of themselves", it asks that human beings acknowledge that they are sinners and will always be; it does not ask man to "pull himself up by his bootstraps", it tells him that he cannot.
In other words, mankind does not come off looking very good in the Bible. Christianity says that there is nothing that man can do about it - he must look to Christ, who has obtained forgiveness of sins already, and is ready to change someone from the inside out. The less I am of me, the more I can be of Christ. I cannot imagine a less "humanistic" creedo. No, the Bible is not a creation of man.
At some point I sincerely hope that you answer my question about 1 John 1:1-2.
"Here lies (name of athiest here), an athiest.
All dressed up and nowhere to go!"
Wrong is that which goes against God. You cannot attempt to define it and still logically hold to the atheistic position. Nevertheless, inconsistently, you have a knowledge of right from wrong or you wouldn't be here.
You again assert a god that you've not demonstrated exists. How is it an "crime against man"? Be specific.
The spectacle of where your worldview has taken you is enough to make me weep. You know in your soul exactly what I am talking about. The murder of 11 million people is a crime against man, according to the universal moral standard which is God.
I do condemn the holocaust, I just recognize that I have no universal standard from which to make a condemnation, thus my condemnation must be from subjective standards.
Your "condemnation" is completely worthless. Why not simply say, "I don't care who is mass murdered, because my atheism so restricts me in my moral thinking that I can't see my way to condemn it." Yet when the tyrant comes to your door, I am sure that you will be the first to take up arms, in total contradiction to your stated beliefs.
Do you really want to appeal to the "historic" position of the Church, which also promoted a geocentric universe for some time?
Yes, because it is the historic position of the church and Bible-believing Christians for the last two centuries. Your comment about the "geocentric" universe is an attempt at injecting an unrelated topic that has nothing to with the point being made.
What about your question? You asked if John was lying, insane or telling the truth.
Yes, and you still have not answered. Saying he "misunderstood" is illogical at best, because the passage makes clear that John has seen, touched and heard Christ. He walked with him for the better part of three years. Manuscript evidence casts severe doubt on the idea that John was "misquoted". No, someone named John claimed it. Now, was he lying, insane, or telling the truth?
By the way, in denying the existence of God, you'll have to prove to me that you have been everywhere in the universe and know with absolute certainty that there is no God. Until then, you cannot know. I can, because of the proof that exists all around us in creation, the rational nature of His Word, and the testimony of what he has done in my life supernaturally.
To you of course it does. But logically and morally it doesn't, because without some outside validation of your opinion it has no more moral legitimacy that your attackers.
Throughout your writings, you present clouded and confused understandings mixing rights with values. When you say something has meaning (in the sense of "value", not "definition"), the immediate question that should arise in you is "meaning to whom". Because, by "meaning" you are referring to a value, and it is individuals that value things (see FACT#1 and FACT#2).
You make a similar error as Decartes who recognized that "I think" but failed to recognize that one cannot simply think without thinking about something. The flexibility of grammar caused this oversight and fed the subjectivism that followed even to this day, where people insist that they cannot know of the existence of a reality outside their own minds.
So, I say it means something to me, referring the value to a valuer. You then reply that it means nothing logically. I must ask you, "logically means nothing to whom? And after you clarify that, I will ask you to demonstate the logical failure.
Fact 3: humans, among all things we observe in our environment, are uniquely controllable through peaceful persuasion.
Look, fact #3 is not an absolute.
You did NOT give ANY "evidence" that it is not an absolute. All you did was make the observation, which is just as obvious and goes hand in hand with FACT#3, that humans can be observed to NOT be controllable through peaceful persuasion. But of course that has NO bearing on FACT#3 which remains, as stated, a true fact that all of us observe, despite your denials. I am left wondering if English maybe is not your first language. There are examples of humans that don't think, but that does not mean that thinking is not a property of humans. There are examples of humans that don't run, but that does not mean that running is not a property of humans.
As you and I pass through this life, we observe many things--falling leaves, rising sun, singing birds, dry soil, etc. A small subset of those things have a property whereby we find that we can control them through peaceful persuasion. We find upon further inspection that the only things we've encountered that have that property are humans (of course it is the property that is important, and if some nonhuman possessed it, then rights would become relevent to that thing as well).
It is that property that leads to rights. As an observation, a characteristic of reality that our senses allow us access to, independent of what anybody believes, it is a fact and thus an absolute. It thus follows anytime and anywhere the natural ingredients come together. It is inferred in ancient writings and in alien cultures. It is part of the human condition.
If you have some other notion of what "absolute" means, I offered you the opportunity to clarify.
I mean, in the morning I tiptoe around my wife to keep from waking her up. I am "altering my behavior" to avoid a conflict. Does that mean my wife has an "absolute right" to sleep?
Following the (absolute) facts of human nature, you are respecting, thoughtful of your past communications and understanding of your wife, her value to sleep. Yes, that is an fairly good simplified example of rights. As an illustration it is limited only in that one might see a rock slowly rolling by another rock and claim that it is choosing to roll quietly thinking about the other rock's value to sleep. Thus, an example with more complicated human behavior would be a better illustration, but this one is pretty good. That you do this for your wife, is an observation in yourself of the truth of FACT#3. With that admission, I do not expect you to deny that fact anymore.
My long-winded analogy of the courtroom was to show that in order to pass moral judgment you need something higher than your own opinions and intellect to be consistent.
Perhaps with the analogy you were trying to allude to something which would allow me to construct for myself the proof of inconsistency of moral judgement without appealing to a "higher"...something. I must say that I don't see it. I am rather hoping that you could provide such clarity yourself, and simply layout the proof. Maybe I can start it for you:
1. I value A.
.
.
.
10. Therefore I do not value A.
11. 1 and 10 prove inconsistency.
Did I? If I did "leave it" I don't recall. Well, in any case, here is the answer. 2+2=4 because God created the universe that way, with order and reason. The Creation, and therefore 2+2=4, cannot exist apart from God.
Sorry, I do not believe that my wife has an absolute right to sleep late, because her right to sleep, through no fault of her own, must often give way to things that are more impotant. If, without having incurred a moral sanction, she must give it up, I cannot see how it is a right - it is merely a preference.
If I commit murder I give up my right to live by God's law and the law of the state. But if the baby wakes up through no fault of my wife's, my wife must give up her "right" to sleep in. Her dignity as a human being is not being "violated" in such a case. Therefore it is not an absolute right - it is a preference.
I may prefer to wear yellow. I have a right to purchase what clothing I wish, if I have the money, and if said clothing is available. It is possible, I think, to make a Biblical case for an absolute right to free commerce. But I do not have an absolute right to wear yellow, even though no one will stand in my way if I do.
Besides, here is the kicker - toddlers cannot be "peacefully persuaded." A small child will put their hand on a burning stove when they do not know that it is hot. They must be physically restrained. You cannot stop a 1-year old from putting their fingers in the socket by launching into a discourse on why it will knock them across the room.
In the end, you still need a transcendent moral standard to account for rights. Fact #3 remains something that is not entirely consistent at all times. Human beings are unique in the world in that some do respond to peaceful persuasion, but that is because they are made in the image of God and can morally reason, unlike a dog or a dolphin. But the fact remains that means of violent coercion must be in place or civilization would collapse into chaos.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.