You will all have seen it - whenever an atheist points out that in fact there is absolutely no evidence of any kind that a god or gods exist the believers (moderate and fundamentalist) respond that you need religion to have morals. This kind of response I saw formalized in a recent article by the former Bishop of Oxford. While pretending to be broadminded he takes it two steps further. Atheists may think they have morals but - "As human beings we can recognise and respond to particular moral insights. But a religious believer claims to understand these as part of a much larger whole in which they have a vital place", and uses an analogy of appreciating a piece of music without understanding that the piece is part of a symphony "and can be even more appreciated when heard as part of the whole in which it has a crucial place". I have trouble writing down these nonsensical arguments which are presented as if they have some factual basis, but stay with me, it gets worse. Not only can atheists not understand that their piddling little bits of morality should be part of a religious whole, but even those piddling bits are stolen from others - "many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up" and "many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage". The good bishop refers to this proposition as "living on moral capital". That is, no atheist can have morality, they are simply, whether they know it or not, using the morality of the religious (and without acknowledgment - must be a copyright issue here, surely!). Boy, and they accuse atheists of arrogance!
Thing is these kind of comments come from representatives of groups that together have some combination of the following moral values - misogyny, telling expedient lies, homophobia, hatred of all religious groups except their own, anti-immigrant, pro-war, anti-science, pro-capitalism, a love of slaughtering animals, burning widows, executing rape victims, executing juveniles, jailing drug users, a hatred of black people, support for forest clearing, support for severe child punishment, torture, pro-military, anti-intellectual, pro-censorship, anti-universal health care, suicide bombing, acceptance of collateral bombing deaths, nuclear war, brain washing of children, blaming the poor for their circumstances, a belief in doing unto others before they do unto you, a belief that life after death is preferable to life before death. I may have missed some.
My values are the opposite of all that. I treat people equally, I would never set out to physically harm another human being, or an animal. I believe in conserving forest not destroying it, am against war, for social justice, for intellectual curiosity and freedom of speech, for telling the truth, for empathizing with others. I love my family, my friends, animals, my world. I love life in fact, not death. Values derived from my sense of humanity, not from some imaginary edicts emerging from the sky.
So I don't share many values with the Pope, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Ayatolla Khomeini, Pat Robertson, Augusto Pincochet, Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, Mitt Romney, Pervez Musharraf, Rudy Guiliani, Moqtada al Sadri, Jerry Falwell, Osama bin Laden, Ian Paisley, Ehud Olmert, Slobodan Milosevic - good religious men all. Think I should?
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And Mao, and Stalin, and... wait a minute...
Seems to me ya got an extremely strong argument. Seems to me mammals as a group for the most part are nurturing and social by nature, although there are always those individuals which are aberrant. It also seems human beings with our active imaginations can take aberrance to an absurdity in a heartbeat, then make sense of it. :)
Happy New Year to You and Yours. Agape.
as 'The Bishop'?
Obviously, if I'm going to be a Moral Person,
I need to hire a bishop to guide me through
life. If I don't, I can't be moral. What could
be simpler? Any doubts? Just ask The Bishop to
explain, for a modest fee.
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/12/claiming-moral-high-ground.html
But I think he's right about one point, as society gets more atheistic, if it does get more atheistic, I would expect society to evolve a different set of mores, but slowly and gradually as it is in fact happening now. While no one can predict precisely what changes will evolve, because it will not be one man who chooses but society as a whole, we can still see where our basic values and principles are leading us. Yes, if we accept gay marriage, then we will probably later accept even more varied forms of domestic partnership like men with multiple wives and wives with multiple husbands. We may broaden the definition of family to include large communes where mates are shared.
Osama bin Laden said, "you in the West love life while we Muslims love death". He was close. Religionists worship death, they tolerate and inflict suffering and authoritarianism and will do everything possible to destroy the natural world because Earth, in their eyes, is an inherently evil place. How do you change people like this?