If atheism and conservatism are incompatible, then I am not a conservative.
Yep
If you’re an atheist, then ...
Where do your rights come from?
Why do you wear clothes?
Why are there seven days in a week?
How do you know what is good and what is evil?
If everything came from nothing out of nowhere,
if life is just a curious side effect of an unknowing and uncaring cosmos,
if when you die, you are just so much compost,
then why seek anything other than a life of self-gratification and a painless extinction?
Think about it. Without God, obviously we’d have no God-given unalienable rights. We’d have only the “rights” government decides we should have. That’s the way it was done all throughout history until our founding fathers recognized the “self-evident truth.” America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal by God and granted their unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness... and self-rule. No king. No dictator. No ruler. No king but God.
Without God, we have no life, no rights and no soul. The Marxists, fascists and godless totalitarians of every stripe want it that way. If man has no soul, then he’s no different from an animal. He can be bred, herded, worked and slaughtered like animals. Again, it’s been that way all through history. In our recent history there was Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and a host of others.
Now we have the godless Marxist/fascist Obama trying to repeat the 30’s. And our younger generations were not taught the truth of history. They have no idea why godless Marxism/fascism should be feared. Forgive them father, they know not what they do.
Historically speaking atheism is not an unknown element in conservatism. The philosophical antecedents of what we now know as conservative thinking do include quite a lot of non-religious ideas, and there have been non-religious or irreligious contributors here. Hume, for one. There is such a thing as a materialist conservatism.
On the other hand there are of course powerful religious roots in conservatism, even as a purely political philosophy.
For that matter there are powerful religious roots in liberalism or progressivism, socialism, even in socialist materialism. Its not for nothing that some call Communism a Christian heresy.
Its the narcissus atheists that have their self as their god that are the biggest problem..most narcissus become atheist because the idea of anything bigger the their self is not acceptable to believe
However beyond that Charles, the specifics become pretty clear. As an atheist, without a God, why would you even believe or care about being pro life? Of course without God, same sex marriage certainly makes sense.
Prayer in school or public forums, even a cross on public property most likely offends you considering that you mistakenly believe the constitution says freedom from instead of freedom OF religion.
Yes, i clearly understand there are exceptions to all cases. But thinking, Bozell might have gotten this one correct.
His reasoning itself presupposes the existence of abstract, universal and invariant things his atheism cannot account for or justify.
It's not that he is unable to reason or moralize. He does that plenty in the article, it's just that his atheism precludes him from being able to give a coherent philosophical explanation of that fact.
Cordially,