”You Know it’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.”O’Hair and the American Atheists convinced the 1970’s courts that Reason dictates that women must be allowed to kill their preborn children, to the tune of over 50,000,000 such children having been killed to date. Read O'Hair's bio to understand how much reason comes into play.
American Atheists
“It’s not what you believe, but how you behave.”A reasoning person might ask about the principles which guide behavior: what are the Atheist principles, and what gives those principles moral authority? There will be no answer, of course, because there is no consistent Atheist moral code for guidance for one’s behavior. Most Atheists behave just like Christians behave, having co-opted the Judeo-Christian ethic even though rejecting its source of moral authority. They do not behave as if there is no moral code. So perhaps the slogan above should be interpreted to mean that you needn’t be a Christian to act like one? If it doesn’t mean that, then it appears to be without meaning at all.
Freedom From Religion Foundation
The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued the Cherry Creek School District (Denver) to force them to remove all character development from the curriculum. The reason? Every good character trait could be found in the bible. FFRF concluded that good character is religion. Good character and good behavior are not on FFRF’s agenda; destruction of religion via secularization of school children, though, is.
“Another running throughout the South shows Butterfly McQueen, the late actress who played Scarlett O’Hara’s maid in “Gone With the Wind.” The billboard says, ‘As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion’. ”The denial that one of the primary purposes of Atheism is rebellion against morality and humility in the face of truth falls flat after declarations like this one. Freedom in this sense means eliminating moral constraints; if one behaves as if one believes there were no moral constraints, then it does, indeed, matter what one believes, as well as how one behaves. That is a rational conclusion, one which seems to continually escape those who advertise their own “rationality”. However, as much as they might believe it, few actually act according to their beliefs; They are living contradictions, who want us to believe that they are the ones who are rational.
Freedom From Religion Foundation
17 comments:
Most Atheists behave just like Christians behave, having co-opted the Judeo-Christian ethic even though rejecting its source of moral authority.
I didn't co-opt anything from Judeo-Christianity. If anything, Judeo-Christianity co-opted heavily from Babylonian and Greek/Roman ethics, while rejecting their non-theistic basis in favor of claiming its origin in divine law.
Most of the rest of this is just angry drivel.
What then is your code of behavior? And how does your behavior differ from Judeo-Christian behavior?
"angry drivel" is not an argument, it is just an ad hominem. Do you wish to argue a point?
Comments from Andrew are removed; he has been removed from this blog.
What is your diet?
Why do you ask?
Well, maybe I don't need to ask. I assume you're some sort of Christian (don't take that offensively, I just mean that I assume you see Jesus as a god). If I'm wrong on this assumption, your diet can be accounted for, but if you're Christian... how do you know not to eat dirt?
You are not making an argument, you are asking some sort of trick question. I'll answer the best that I can:
We all eat dirt. It's part of the food chain. Plus we all ingest dust from the air.
OK, so what is your punchline to this joke?
Ginx,
Stan does ask an interesting question that is worth thinking about, but sometimes I don't think it's put forth as clearly as it could be (not Stan's fault).
The issue concerns the ontology of morality, not the epistemology of it. The claim is not that one must believe any particular religion to have morality, but that morality must be anchored "offshore" to have any meaning. It doesn't matter if you do or do not believe in the existence of this anchoring.
I myself am agnostic about these issues, but I do find them interesting. Here is one version of the moral argument, which may shed more light on what Stan is getting at:
Premise: If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
I.e., if naturalism/materialism is true, then you can't derive an "ought" from anything. Take a moral situation, such as a homicide and make a full accounting of it: the victims and their pain, the murderer and his pleasure, the long term effects of it, etc etc. None of this produces an "ought." The victim feels pain? So what? Why "oughtn't" we make others feel pain? Unrestricted murder leads to societal breakdown? So what? Why "ought" we preserve society? Societal breakdown does not assist human flourishing? So what? Why "ought" we produce human flourishing? On humanism, say, humans are just a species of primate. So why the special treatment, then? Why elevate humans to some higher standard?
Premise: Objective moral values exist
To be a relativist is to admit that the Nazis did nothing wrong. You like chocolate, they like vanilla. You can't condemn them because they are just expressing an opinion. But in our collective moral experience, we do seem to think that some things are morally wrong. Most people would agree that it is an objective fact that raping and murdering a child is wrong, not just a preference.
Make sense?
It's not a joke. I am sure we all ingest some dirt, dust and debris. Rather, I'm asking this: how it is you know not to go outside and scoop up a handful of dirt when you're hungry?
Revelation, I imagine. From my mother. Now, give us the punchline.
If you're going for infinite regress, it won't work.
Alright I will take a shot at a Just So Story that will be created specifically to cover the issue presented.
Probably most precocious children have put dirt in their mouths. Whether they liked the taste or not, the experience probably was not satisfactory. This personal observation led to the empirical knowledge that dirt is not satisfactory for eating. For the individual, this became a foundational principle, one certain enough and with justification sufficient to pass that information along their own children, presuming that they could do so before their children found it out for themselves.
So the original knowledge is empirical observation at a personal level, falsifiable but not falsified, and the ensuing acculturated knowledge becomes foundational, and as foundational knowledge it becomes common knowledge.
Do I know this Just So Story to be valid? No. But like other Just So Stories, it will be difficult to argue with, unless one has a better competing theory to offer. Maybe you have one?
I didn't have a point or a punchline, I just honestly wonder how someone whose holy book doesn't tell them not to do something knows not to do it, since ethics and morality are apparently only capable of coming from such sources.
So you think that eating dirt is a moral issue? Why would you think that?
Bret. Look up. I think you may have missed my comment.
So you think that eating dirt is a moral issue? Why would you think that?
Every major religion that has ever been documented, except Christianity, spells out explicit rules of some kind regarding diet, under the pretense of morality. As a simple example, eating people is certainly a moral issue, yes?
What I'm asking you is this: since your holy book does not spell out what you can or cannot eat, how is it yo uare able to know what you should or shouldn't eat? If you can answer this yourself, then you can answer for yourself the question of how an atheist knows wrong from right.
So why not just say that you are a Consequentialist, rather than play word games? Consequentialism is an ethic without a hint of morality, which seems to be your point.
And killing people is immoral, except to Consequentialists and Virtue Ethicists, but eating dead people I don't think is a moral issue so much as a gustatorial issue.
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