{"id":637,"date":"2010-11-16T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T18:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/more-thoughts-on-being-good-without-god.html"},"modified":"2010-11-16T18:43:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T18:43:00","slug":"more-thoughts-on-being-good-without-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/more-thoughts-on-being-good-without-god.html","title":{"rendered":"More Thoughts On Being Good Without God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Not too long ago I wrote about the American Humanist Association\u2019s new ad campaign promoting humanism.\u00a0 In the ads biblical quotes are presented alongside the views of humanism in order to point out the contrast between modern values and biblical values.<\/p>\n

Now comes the backlash.\u00a0 Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby has written on his boston.com<\/a> blog:<\/p>\n

\u2026[I]t will take more than a few grim verses plucked out of context to substantiate the core message of the American Humanist Association\u2019s ad campaign: that God and the Judeo-Christian tradition are not necessary for the preservation of moral values and that human reason is a better guide to goodness than Bible-based religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Plucked out of context?!\u00a0 My critique of the campaign is that there were so many more abhorrent verses that they could have chosen.\u00a0 Jacoby\u2019s claims about biblical morality are fairly consistent with the two classes of people who believe in \u201cbiblical values.\u201d\u00a0 The first is the fundamentalists who honestly believe that we should return to such values.\u00a0 The second is comprised of all the people who have never studied (or even read) the bible, but just \u201cknow\u201d that its values are critically important.<\/p>\n

Jacoby continues:<\/p>\n

Can people be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good? Sure. There have always been kind and ethical nonbelievers. But how many of them reason their way to kindness and ethics, and how many simply reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised?<\/p>\n

In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. \u201cWe know that you can be good without God,\u2019\u2019 [AHA head Roy] Speckhardt tells CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He can be confident of that only because he lives in a society so steeped in Judeo-Christian values that he takes those values for granted. But a society bereft of that religious heritage is one not even Speckhardt would want to live in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a ridiculous assertion.\u00a0 Has the man ever read about the long, long history of immorality in Christendom?\u00a0 Traditional biblical values support slavery, misogyny, racism, genocide and homophobia, to name just a few.\u00a0 Maybe Jacoby thinks these are good values.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s more:<\/p>\n

For in a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees \u201cThou shalt not murder.\u2019\u2019 It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone. One might reason instead \u2014 as Lenin and Stalin and Mao reasoned \u2014 that there is nothing wrong with murdering human beings by the millions if doing so advances the Marxist cause. Or one might reason from observing nature that the way of the world is for the strong to devour the weak \u2014 or that natural selection favors the survival of the fittest by any means necessary, including the killing of the less fit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where do I even begin?\u00a0 \u201cThou shalt not murder\u201d?\u00a0 Again, Jacoby, read the damn book.\u00a0 There\u2019s murder and wholesale slaughter everywhere in the text.\u00a0 In her brilliant one-woman show, Letting Go of God<\/a><\/i>, Julia Sweeney says that when she finally did let go she was attacked by the thought, \u201cWhat\u2019s gonna keep me from just going out and MURDERING people?\u201d\u00a0 Then she remembered:<\/p>\n

\u2026I had to walk myself through it.\u00a0 Why are we ethical?\u00a0 Well, because we have to be.\u00a0 I mean we\u2019re social animals, extremely complex social animals.\u00a0 And we evolved this moral sense, like an aversion to murder in order for communities to exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surely it doesn\u2019t take much for a Jacoby to figure that out. \u00a0As for Lenin, Stalin and Mao, I suggest Jacoby read up on these folks.\u00a0 They were anything but humanists.\u00a0 They may not have believed in a supernatural god but they created fanatical dogmas of their own that were no more rational than those found in religion.\u00a0 For more on this he could read Hitchens.\u00a0 Or just open a history book.<\/p>\n

As for the reference to natural selection.\u00a0 Well, I\u2019ll just be kind and say that perhaps he doesn\u2019t quite understand the principle and how it relates to human, as opposed to bear or shark evolution.<\/p>\n

This need that conservatives have to constantly bow at the altar of religious authority is disturbing.\u00a0 It demonstrates the hypocrisy of a movement supposedly dedicated to liberty and individualism, while at the same time it offers a blind obeisance to anything uttered by a \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d authority.\u00a0 That\u2019s how Republicans started teaming up with fundamentalists in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago I wrote about the American Humanist Association\u2019s new ad campaign promoting humanism.\u00a0 In the ads biblical quotes are presented alongside the views of humanism in order to point out the contrast between modern values and biblical values. Now comes the backlash.\u00a0 Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby has written on his boston.com blog:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,12,17,27,30],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-atheism","tag-fundamentalist-christianity","tag-humanism","tag-morality","tag-non-theism"],"yoast_head":"\nMore Thoughts On Being Good Without God<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Not too long ago I wrote about the American Humanist Association\u2019s new ad campaign promoting humanism.\u00a0 In the ads biblical quotes are presented alongside\" \/>\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\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/more-thoughts-on-being-good-without-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"More Thoughts On Being Good Without God\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Not too long ago I wrote about the American Humanist Association\u2019s new ad campaign promoting humanism.\u00a0 In the ads biblical quotes are presented alongside\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/more-thoughts-on-being-good-without-god.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Atheist Rabbi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-11-16T18:43:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jeffrey L. 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