Ban Children Everywhere on the Planet for 5 Years

Because Brights are so much smarter and more realistic than the common herd.

On the right rail of the Free Thinking blog, juxtaposed with this bit lunacy dancing in broad daylight, another article asks, “Are Atheists Just Immoral Fools?”

Don’t tempt me, buddy.

Seriously though. Atheists are really going to have to get a clue about what is being said by theists in the morality debate. Yeah, you can find some fundies who will say that it’s impossible for an atheist to be moral. You can also beat up girls scouts. Doesn’t prove you’re strong.

The real issue (which guys like Hitchens never seem to even grasp, much less engage) is the fact that if you posit a universe of nothing but Is (i.e. a materialist universe of nothing but time, space, matter and energy) there’s no way to derive an “ought” from it. What you must *always* do, by sleight of hand and jiggery pokery, is borrow your “oughts” from theism and then pretend that they are “self-evident” or “evolutionary imperatives” or some other BS. In short, atheists are not so much immoral as they are thieves, for most of them are, in fact, strident moralists–Hitchens chief among them. But what they never really do (or even seem capable of realizing they need to do) is explain how they got some grand moral imperative from a universe of Is. It seems never to cross their minds. A really honest atheist like Richard Rorty makes short work such incoherent junk when he writes that (on an atheist accounting) there is no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, “Why not be cruel?”

Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question . . . is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.

The New Atheists like Myers and Hitchens loudly declare Nothing is Sacred and then just as loudly declare that reason, intellectual liberty, science, their loved ones, human dignity (for humans they happen to like) and many other things are sacred and inviolable. That passionate love of the sacred is what fills their rhetoric with such fire.

Rorty’s point is that it’s all a theft from a covert belief in something that transcends the mere realm of Is. Some Ought binds time, space, matter, and energy whirling through their paces when these phenomena happen to take the shape of a human being. That’s why P.Z. Myers tried to provide a fig leaf for his eucharistic desecration by citing the mistreatment of Jews in the 13th Century: they *ought* not be mistreated. Rorty’s point is that, however you slice it, this is rubbish from an atheist perspective. If you are going to have a world of Is alone, then deal with it and stop trying to have the benefits of a Judeo-Christian world of a Transcendent Oughts with none of the obligations. If you are going to say Nothing is Sacred then say it and don’t take it back by sentimentalizing about the piece of matter who happens to be your child or a persecuted Jew or whatever it is you are trying to privilege. Appeals to evolutionary programming “making” you care about your child are all well and good, but why should I care if your pet object of sanctity is in the way of sufficiently big plans for my personal gain and I can get away with it?

That, by the way, is why I *would* say that, though an atheist is not necessarily immoral (or at any rate, any more immoral than the rest of us), I am very far from persuaded that atheism is likely to churn out secular saints. Most people who say they don’t believe in God are still under the lingering influence of a religious tradition that influences them to do good works. Devoted atheism tends to have a cramping effect on the soul, which is why you see evangelical atheists devoting themselves to destroying religion–and little else. Where are the vast charitable works undertaken for the poor and sick of the world in the name of Atheism? Our age has taken Christian apostolates and distorted them. It has not created new outreaches to the weak, helpless and destitute–except, of course, to offer them ways to kill their children and off themselves. That’s to be expected since atheism sees only this world. If this world sucks, then the quickest thing to do to bring relief is to end life, since there is no hope. Not a formula for heroic virtue.