Atheists Are Guud

Wandering around fairly aimlessly I came across the following explanation of both Atheist morals and Christian morals as understood by an Atheist. The site is BackyardSkeptics.com, which is the group responsible for advertising their We Have Doubts and Good Without God Skepticism on bus stops in Southern California. The following claims are so non-coherent that I couldn’t resist taking them up here.

“Many atheists feel it is the harder choice to not have a 'moral rule book' in their lives. Atheists take each situation separately and decide what is the moral thing to do. Many times it is very ethical to lie or cheat - for example, to defend your family, or to protect an innocent person. Some say this is a harder choice because atheists have to look at Christian's value system as will as everyone else and decide if their choices are moral. This is another reason I have chosen to be an atheist. – the Bible has so many unethical an immoral stories of death and destruction - it boggles the mind how Christians can believe such nonsense. See Numbers 31 and tell me that the taking of virgins for sex slaves is ethical. Amazing!”

Yes, that is true: Atheists do take each situation separately and decide for themselves what is the moral thing to do. That is called relativism, and it is the position that Atheists can and do change morality on the spot, because it is convenient and they are extra- moral anyway. Relativism is highly unpredictable and cannot be considered an ethic, at least not if one expects consistent decisions of an ethic.

And yes, they will decide when it is ethical to lie or cheat. Or what ever. And that is why they are not trusted by anyone else. Who knows when they are going to decide to lie or cheat or whatever their momentary urge might be? In other words, they cannot be trusted to produce a single, stable set of behaviors, even for one of them, much less an entire group of them. So this is not an ethic at all.

However, we can depend upon them to distort the Bible, because they think that works in their favor every time they do it. The example above is a beauty. If your recollection of Numbers 31 is dim or non-existent, as was mine, then grab up a Bible and read, but start at Numbers 25. I don't usually take on biblical distortions by atheists, because that doesn't disprove the existence of a creating First Cause in any way. However, this guy first distorts and then claims it as a reason for believing that there is no God, which is another non-coherence in his statement.

The Atheist accusation is that the Israelites kept virgins as sex slaves, and the self-righteous moral outrage at the Bible is based on that accusation. But the verse in question doesn’t say that at all. It says, “save for yourselves every girl that has not slept with a man.” Now why would they do that?

Back at Numbers 25, is the answer: the Midianites had seduced the Israelites into sexual perversion and idolatry, and the some of the Israelites had been morally compromised and befouled beyond recovery. There is an order to slaughter all those involved, but the Israelite army did not kill the women and boys; so the order went out to complete the task by killing the non-virgin women and the boys, but to keep the virgin females. Now why keep them? The non-virgin women were a threat because they were seductresses. The boys would figure into inheritances and were a threat to family stability. But the virgin girls were not a threat. But were they kept as sex slaves? After the killing of thousands, including seduced Israelites, sexual immorality would not have been an option. So no, not as sex slaves, it does not say that and it is not a logical conclusion. However they might have been kept as household servants and treated with the legal protections afforded those. Or they might have been kept as de facto daughters.

But there is absolutely no possible way to conclude that they were sex slaves, if one reads more than just the one verse. Atheist versions of the Bible are based on searches for verses that offend them, which is odd, because they admit to having no morals dictated by their belief. In fact, the entire Midianite episode is entirely within the Consequentialist ethic tactic that tumbles automatically out of the Atheist moral vacuum.

Bottom line: Atheists are always good, by their own definition that Atheism = good. In other words, it is tautological in their minds. They decide what is good in their own minds, so when they do it, they are good QED. Maybe in the Atheist case it should be spelled differently, maybe guud. Atheists = Guud. That’s definitely better.

Afterthought: usually Atheists take offense at the entire idea of God ordering the eradication of offensive cultures. Interesting that this particular one took offense only at the “sex slave” interpretation, which wasn’t even a valid complaint. One never knows just what it is that their morality of the day will find offensive. Or acceptable, for that matter. You just can't know what to expect from an Atheist, so as the old Boswell quote goes, "when he leaves, we should count the silverware".