One Final Thing I Notice

In the thread I mention below, my “Might Makes Right” theorizer says, “The fact that morality feels compulsory does not necessitate that morality is compulsory, beyond the punishments society sets for violating its moral code.”

Note the extremely impoverished understanding of what “morality” is supposed to be about. It’s classic Minimum Daily Adult Requirement thinking. We are atomized individuals doing exactly as we please for as long as we like without any regard for others and the only thing to stop that is the punishments society might inflict in a sort of animal self-defensiveness. It the Warre of All Against All. Any stirrings of conscience you might feel are, at best, psychic outposts of our surrounding culture, planted in our thought processes by social pressure/evolutionary mechanisms/whatnot in order to sort of *pre-emptively* make you conform to societal norms on your own so that you don’t use your freedom to its full extent and thus bring the punishing wrath of society down on your head.

Nowhere in this narrative is there the slightest conception of love, nor of the idea that conscience does not merely warn us to avoid evil, but bids us to do good out of love for other persons. It is (as atheist narratives so often tend to be) remarkably clueless about elementary social interactions involving things like tenderness to one’s children, a sense of obligation to one’s friends for friendship’s sake, love of one’s spouse, love (and not mere fear) of God. The notion that a stab of conscience is much beyond Evolution’s way of saying, “Look out. You could get hit with a stick by Society if you try to get away with this” seems not to be there. The idea that people might act honorably for honor’s sake or love for love’s sake is not on the radar. Is it any wonder that the New Atheists often strike people as laboring with some basic disabilities in the affective and emotional departments of the peronality? Would that we heard less of this rubbish and more from humane and sympathetic atheists like Theodore Dalrymple. The gulf between him and the clueless gits responding to him over at Dick Dawkins’ site tells you all you need to know about the catastrophic social skills that the New Atheist both exhibit themselves and cultivate among their equally socially unskilled sycophants and acolytes.