{"id":38653,"date":"2016-12-13T19:48:28","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T02:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=38653"},"modified":"2016-12-13T19:48:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T02:48:28","slug":"atheism-evil-foundations-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2016\/12\/atheism-evil-foundations-morality.html","title":{"rendered":"Atheism, evil, and the foundations of morality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Buchenwald — I visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time in the summer of 2015. A naturalistic materialist can oppose such things, of course. She can point out that they cause pain, harm society, and so forth. But can she pronounce them objectively, absolutely, non-metaphorically evil? \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
An entertaining and provocative 17.5 minutes:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s pretty painfully obvious to me that the two atheist interlocutors didn\u2019t really get the point. \u00a0Of course, in fairness, they\u2019re scarcely alone in this. \u00a0I\u2019ve found that the atheists I\u2019ve spoken to have rarely been able to see the issue, either. \u00a0They often assume, quite indignantly, that the claim is that atheists can\u2019t be good people, or that atheists are indifferent to moral evils. \u00a0But that isn\u2019t the point at <em>all<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 An entertaining and provocative 17.5 minutes: \u00a0 \u00a0 It\u2019s pretty painfully obvious to me that the two atheist interlocutors didn\u2019t really get the point. \u00a0Of course, in fairness, they\u2019re scarcely alone in this. \u00a0I\u2019ve found that the atheists I\u2019ve spoken to have rarely been able to see the issue, either. \u00a0They often assume, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Atheism, evil, and the foundations of morality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    An entertaining and provocative 17.5 minutes:   https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wQ-aqnDHqqA   It's pretty painfully obvious to me\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2016\/12\/atheism-evil-foundations-morality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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