Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted*

Vox Nova is the Catholic Slacktivist. The contributor(s) are unashamedly liberal, deeply concerned for the poor and the suffering, welcome nonCatholics with open arms and preach understanding and tolerance over bigotry and hatred. You can imagine how that goes over in the Catholic blogosphere. You can also imagine that I like Vox Nova very much.

So it's not this post I am snarking on, I happen to agree that atheists have morals like everyone else, it's the inevitable "atheists so do not have morals and Hitler was an atheist and that proves my point!" (I have no idea why, but Vox Nova comments always set the land record for fastest unrelated idea to Godwinning.)

David, you are correct that many atheists do live moral lives, however my point was that there is nothing in atheist belief, or non-belief if you will that compels them to do so.

Doesn't that make us better than Christians? Think about this for a second. Chris here is living his life to attain heaven and avoid hell. At best, that's enlightened self interest. If I believed in hell and someone had a good argument that wearing hats made out of green jello was the only guaranteed way to avoid hell, you'd better believe my head would be covered in green jello at all times. Really, Chris' behavior is just like a person who stops at every stop light, even at 4am when no one else is around and you're waiting for nothing. You wait to avoid the possibility of getting a ticket. Chris behaves to avoid hell.

I, on the other hand, have no hell to avoid and no heaven to attain. I act morally because . . . well, it really doesn't occur to me to do otherwise. I bleed for the poor, the downtrodden, the abused and rejected because I know how that feels and "good" isn't in it. I help where I can because I have benefited from help, and to inspire others to help because the world needs more of that. But I'm not expecting anything out of it.

So who's the better person, Chris?

No one can judge one a “bad atheist” in the same way they can identify one as a bad Christian for example.

Ummm . . . I'm not really sure what that means, to be honest. A bad person is a bad person, Christian, atheist or otherwise. If he means a substandard atheist, I guess that would be an atheist who worships occasionally.

There are standards and norms by which one can judge one’s life to be a sound example of following Christ or not, but to one who denies God, there is really no such set of norms on which to judge them, at least not on moral grounds. They can easily change the rules of morality, as Stalin, Hitler and notable others have done to justify their barbarity in the name of a subjectively defined good; a master race, proletarian rights, etc.

Chris, anyone can change the rules to suit themselves. Neither belief in god nor god hisownself stops Christians from doing so. You want some "notable others" to add to your Godwin? How about every Catholic priest who molested children? You can't diddle children without changing your morals to suit yourself. (Hopefully.) How about every pastor who embezzled from their church? How about those Crusaders who spread war and death and torture across the Middle East to spread the word of a god who said that the meek shall inherit the Earth?

How about them, Chris?

*That quote is apocraphally attributed to Hassan i-Sabbah, and is quite a bit more difficult and thought provoking than a first look reveals.

**It's Simile Monday here in Hell! Feel free to add your own.

Vast Amounts of Atheist Money

mariano, atheism, atheist, morality, morals, ethical, ethics

The same people who can't shut up about Jesus just can't seem to understand why atheists might want to advertise their viewpoint. I will give them this: the motivation is different. Atheists aren't really hoping you'll convert to atheism, we just want to let other atheists know they're not alone, and it's okay to believe or not believe as you will.

Atheists live in a world that rejects us, even demonizes us, at every turn. Speaking as a US citizen, god is on my money, in my pledge, the reason for a Federal holiday, and permeates the language and culture. Belief is the assumed default, to admit that one does not believe can generate any reaction from stupid misunderstanding (one person actually said to my nephew, "so, you're Jewish?") to outright hostility. Everyone in our culture thanks god for the great and the small, speaks of miracles and prays for us.

It can be a little lonely.

Mariano, who declares that atheism is dead (we'll categorize this under "demonize"), adds a little extra stupid to his outrage over the bus ads.

Yes, they are at it again. Having nothing better to do with vast amounts of money more atheist bus ads are being purchased.

Okay, where is the vast amount of atheist money, and how do I get some of it?

What has Mariano's panties in a bunch? The idea, as shown in the above picture, that one can be moral and ethical without god. The truly ridiculous thing about Mariano's outrage is that this is an undeniable fact. Arguing about this is like arguing whether or not water is wet. Secular societies have lower rates of violence and teen pregnancy. Atheists are better at marriage. Atheists make up the tiniest portion of the prison population. Sorry, Mariano, Jesus doesn't make you better than me.

The Problem With Morality From Above

torture, waterboarding, hitchens, christophers, christian, protestant, evangelical, religion, morality, morals

A new CNN survey proves exactly the atheist concern with morality from above.

Morality from above is the religious view of morality: if god says it's okay, no matter how horrible it is, I'm okay with it. God says that oppressing homosexuals is good, then that's what I'll do.

The atheist perspective on morality is a little different. We have nowhere to go for our morals other than ourselves, so we naturally go to golden rule morality: would I want this done to me? Should I oppress gays? Hmmm . . . would I want to be oppressed? No. Then I shouldn't do it to other people.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded to determine if that qualified as torture or not. (Note: that video is disturbing.) I think that anyone who isn't sure if waterboarding is torture or not, should do what Hitchens did. I've already drowned once, so I know the answer. It is.

If you think torturing people (and yes, terrorists are indeed people, bad people, but people) is okay, you might want to consider two things: it's very hard to take the position that captured USians should not be tortured when we run around torturing people, and torture produces unreliable information. People being tortured will say anything to make it stop. Anything at all.

It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

Think about that for a moment. We (and we all must take responsibility for the actions of our government) tortured a human being in order to obtain unreliable information. I'm pretty sure just asking would have produced that result. At least then we could have maintained the moral high ground. Now, here we are, down in the muck, and 60% of white evangelical protestants think that's a fabulous place to be.

Eternal Critic Winz Teh Interwebs!

eternal critic, god, morality, bible, atheism, atheist, morals
Eternal Critic, over at One God Further, has the most succinct answer to "morality only comes from god" argument ever.

Atheists often have to argue about the issue of morality and whether or not we require a deity to be moral. The fact that not all gods can exist (as some are dogmatically the only one), and all societies have morals and ethics, how could a wrong god provide morals? Clearly god is not a requirement for this.

Well, duh. I feel silly for not having seen this.