Ken Ham makes a morality argument. He’s perturbed by a study that showed religious people are no more moral than non-religious people.
It’s important to understand that even though atheists and agnostics can be “moral,” they have no ultimate authoritative basis for their morality. When an atheist or agnostic calls something “right”or “wrong”or “good”or “evil,” they are borrowing from a biblical worldview in order to make that statement. Think about it: If we are simply the by-product of evolution and no better than animals, then why should anyone behave morally? In that case, what or who defines right from wrong? Ultimately, this kind of thinking leads to “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25), which is exactly where our culture is rapidly sliding.
So he’s willing to concede that atheists can act morally, but he has to say something to salvage his sense of superiority. He has two arguments.
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But they don’t have a higher authority telling them to be good!
I would think having an autonomous sense of right and wrong would be superior to requiring someone else to tell you what you should do. I would especially think it superior when there isn’t actually anyone else — it’s just a voice in your head that you use to justify any of your actions. -
What morality they have they borrow from the Bible!
That makes no sense at all. If my morality comes from the Bible, how come I think the Bible is so wrong about so many things? Why does Ken Ham make moral decisions — opposing gay rights, maintaining the inferiority of women, denying science and reality — that he claims are biblically based, but that I disagree with categorically?
He’s also wrong about it leading to everyone doing what is right in his own eyes
. It leads to everyone doing what is right in the eyes of their community — other people — and trying to do what makes life better for themselves and others.
Unless, of course, you’re some kind of libertarian dork. You have the option to be an entirely selfish jerk, and no god is going to stop you, but I think that position is ultimately self-defeating.
It bothers me that there are people out there who would evidently murder, rape, pillage and plunder, if only god didn’t exist. That god and a fear of punishment were the only thing stopping them. It sounds like an eight-year-old.
It also bothers me that the bible is absolute morality. We have to ask WHO’s holy book? And what was god only joshin’ about? I mean, why aren’t they calling for a constitutional amendment against bacon-cheeseburgers? Leviticus is good for at least 700 amendments alone, if you trust the bible. They pick and choose what they want to believe out of it; that is just as arbitrary as anything.
That sounds a lot like “If there is nothing but atoms and the void, then why tell the truth and why fight for Athens”. That, supposedly, is the “moral” argument that defeated the ancient atomists. My answer is, what means would you have to investigate the question of atoms if you don’t tell the truth; and where do you do your investigations if you don’t have a stable society?
Morality has always been decided by humans. The morality might change with changing circumstances and new knowledge.
Ham is stuck on the morality written down by a bunch of scribes scared of women having periods 2500 years ago. Unlike the US constitution, there is no way of amending that “carved in stone” morality with new circumstances and knowledge. He is stuck in a black hole of ignorance and arrogance.
I had a friend in grad school who had a Christian roommate. When the roommate learned that my friend was an atheist, she asked why she wasn’t out robbing banks. My friend answered that that would conflict with her ambition to become a biochemist.
Riiiight… even though I’m not chained down to something makes understanding morality impossible, I am free to do the right thing. Despite the fact that your shit-peddling isn’t getting in my way, it isn’t one of the things that get in my way. Indeed, other things might, but I’ll take my chances with not introducing more shit into my life.
Nope.
I already did. You still get a “nope.”
Because behaving morally is by definition the thing anyone should do, dumbass.
And we are animals. And besides that, “better than animals” is just a lot of noise, about an empty category someone invented and scribbled into Genesis. You being fractally wrong and arguing in circles isn’t compelling, at least not to me…. Is this supposed to be convincing to anyone?
It’s defined by what in fact causes pleasure or pain, or on another level well-organized societies which are fair or just, etc. If your god (or anybody else) existed and “defined” it some other way, he/she/it/they would not be worth listening to.
To Authoritarians and Dogmatists, authoritarianism and dogma IS the same as morality.
The idea of being good for goodness sake goes against the entire worldview.
wcorvi @1 wrote,
While this is an interesting, and sometimes effective, argument to lever open the minds of people who claim that all morality comes from , be careful to avoid assuming that that people who make that claim are only restrained from immoral behavior by their fear of god.
People who are going to murder, rape, pillage and plunder will find a justification to do so whether they believe in any gods or not. Often these atrocious acts are even claimed to be justified by their gods.
People who already act morally will tend to act just as moral without any belief in a deity. In other words, religion has co-opted morality and claimed an external cause for morality. However, morality comes from within a person.
So this is a good debate question, alongside of pointing out that atheists only believe in one less god than christians, but it does not mean that disproving the existence of god to a random theist will cause them to murder, rape, pillage and plunder.
If people are going to talk about borrowing, you’d think they could do so in their own words, wouldn’t you? Has any one of them ever expressed that sentiment without using that exact string of words?
I may be borrowing many aspects of my ethical framework from the society in which I live, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to determine right from wrong with only the use of empathy and an awareness of other people in the world.
Anyone asking that likely hasn’t ever looked at how other animals treat each other, especially those evolutionarily closest to humans. They have their harmful individuals, certainly, but they have systems of ethics that are pretty similar to our own.
Especially since the former indicates an actual capacity to discern what is right and what is wrong, where the latter does not. if we are truly incapable of distinguishing right from wrong on our own then how could we trust anything that claims it can that is in fact can? I’m sure Ham would say something to the effect that his god distilled some sense of morality within but, at best, that’s just a wormy way of conceding the point while trying not to admit it. At worst it doesn’t even really address the problem as we would still have no idea if what Ham’s god put there was right or wrong.
wrong, go read Sense and Goodness Without God.
Has Ken never heard of Euthyphro? Or is he just ignoring it?
Coincidentally, last night I had a dream that me and about 40 other people had been captured by some kind of cult that were compelled by their beliefs to terminate us for not following their ways.
The situation was hopeless, but I started firing their logic back at them.
Silly arbitrary morality should only exist in nonsensical dreams.
So if we don’t really know the difference between good and evil without God having to tell us, then maybe Adam and Eve didn’t really eat that apple.
If you take advantage of Ken’s prayer request at the bottom of every post, you are taken directly to his donation page. I have an image of Ken checking the ‘donation graph’ after every post. If donations go down, he forgets that particular subject. If donations go up, he gives the flock more of the same. When he’s in the counting house with his wife and family, I’ll bet they laugh and laugh and laugh.
@13 paulambos
I laughed out loud at that, well done :P
I’ve noticed, from watching debates and reading things like this, that a great many people experience a sort of backwards thinking pattern. Humans tend to be relatively narcissistic; there’s a tendency to think that things exist for us as opposed to the reality that we are just part of a naturally occurring environment. Religious people tend to think in this backwards way when they say things like: the earth was created for life, when life actually adapted to the earth. Or that our morals come from the bible (or some other “holy” book) when it was people who recorded the current moral system of that time period in the “holy” book. Douglas Adams nailed this type of thinking with his puddle analogy. Unfortunately, it’s not just fundamentalists that think this way, it’s humans in general. Weaning humanity off of this kind of lazy, narcissistic thinking takes a great deal of discipline, intellectual curiosity, and intellectual integrity; a thing that the Ken Hamms of the world lack.
In that case or any case whatsoever, what or who defines God as being right or wrong? The claim that we need a divine authority to tell us what’s good and what’s evil must have at least one moral imperative which can’t come from God: obey God because God is ‘good.’ That one — with all its implications and entailments — we have to figure out on our own. In which case it looks like we’re on our own, period. You can’t skip the work. Not unless you’ve confused morality with ‘obedience’ and have no more mental depth than a toddler. Less, perhaps.
AS Scientismist points out at #2, the argument that a by-product of evolution can’t be moral is similar to the argument that a being composed of atoms can’t be moral either. “There’s no reason” is I think a deepity, with two meanings. On one level they’re talking about motivation, sure. But I also suspect there is greedy reductionism and a Like-Comes-Only-From-Like Composition/Division Fallacy going on. They want an explanation — and they want it easy, simple and simplistic.
God is supposed to “make sense” of morality because God is more or less made of morality: He’s the essence of Goodness. God “gives” it to us like an inheritance, or a gift. But where in the mindless evolutionary process of matter in motion does the moral sense come in — if we can’t import it from somewhere else? Complex layers of explanation and the concept of new things coming from out of interacting patterns completely eludes them.
So does the fact that you can’t just jump right in with the blithe assurance that God is “good” by definition. Whose definition?
If you need some “inherent” authority to dictate morality, it’s inherently arbitrary. It’s the ‘just your opinion’ / ‘might makes right’ morality they claim to decry. That god just chooses whatever strikes its fancy at any particular moment because it exists in a moral vacuum. There’s no moral reasoning to be done in such a system, meaning there’s no such thing as justification or purpose for behaving a certain way, except possibly for a selfish, non-morally based desire to avoid hellfire.
Yep, and what’s even more important to understand, people like Ham have yet to demonstrate why we need one.
I don’t consider Ham, or any of his theistic ilk ‘moral’ at all. If you only do the right thing out of hope for reward, or fear of punishment, then you aren’t moral.
You’re a slave.
Why is society itself, the culture that we have evolved into over the centuries and millenia, the culture that has changed as what we know has changed, never considered to be an authoritative basis for morality?
Unfortunately, there seems to be an abundance of them among us.
Because there is at least the notion that society itself has evolved to optimize benefits for all or at least most of its component people. As opposed to primarily benefiting the authorities.
Sastra:
Yep, pretty much. Doesn’t make sense, but it is at least an idea — I’ll give it that.
Or closer to your first thought, a god’s supposed to be the spring or source from which goodness flows. Where do you get goodness? Answer: from the goodness store, obviously. Simple, right? Or it’s sort of a “cause” in a material sense — if goodness were a substance like uranium, a god would just be uranium itself; and when we’re good, we’d be in a state of containing or producing or using that substance in the world.
Another idea is sort of like the “ground of being.” It’s not a being which exists; it’s the beingosity or existingness of all existing beings. Without it, things wouldn’t Be!!!1eleventy!! (Who ordered that?) Of course, it bears no resemblance to a theistic god, but that doesn’t stop the true believer. As a bonus, it can sound slightly more sophistimicated if you dress it up in lots of pretentious verbiage, but it’s basically the same deal. The downside is that morality is a lot more personally and socially significant than some esoteric notion about ontology, so it’s probably not as easy to pummel atheists and believers alike into submission. Anyway, you could say a god has the same kind of relationship to goodness itself: god isn’t strictly speaking a good being (of course not, don’t be silly!), but is sort of necessary for it. Because it just can’t be without some other thing making it that way, apparently. Also, he’s a card-carrying NRA member with a penis — one who loves America, white girls, trolling liberals on the internet and wants us to wreck our environment and our economy as quickly as possible. Obviously. Simple, totally simple.
Sometimes, but I think many of them are doing their best to elude it. For whatever reason, they don’t want to listen. I don’t read you as calling them stupid here — intelligent people like simpler explanations too (parsimony and so forth) — but I don’t think it’s just that they don’t “get it” somehow. A lot of them think that they don’t or shouldn’t want to get it.
To go with the spring metaphor again, it’s like asking where the water comes from in a river. You can explain how it fits into the water cycle or whatever, or go back even further into how oxygen was produced in stars, which then became part of water molecules, etc… But they just don’t seem to care about that sort of answer in the first place. They think it’s going to be unsatisfying, or that they’re better off the way they are (risk-averse perhaps, worried about hell or social factors or who knows what), so they don’t even bother.
@1, wcorvi
I think you know this is just a rhetorical gambit on theists’ part, but you can have fun with it. When someone makes the claim that without God’s word they’d have no reason not to murder, rape, pillage and plunder, ask them about it in all seriousness, and make it personal (for the sake of argument). If they have children, ask them if they’re honest with their children. Ask them if they tuck their children in to bed with a “Good night, sweetheart. If God didn’t tell me not to, I’d murder you in your bed. Sleep tight!” That’s the implication, right? That’s what they’re telling you they think. So force them to own it, or abandon it.
@9, Jeremy Shaffer
You make several nice points, but I want to add to one:
Exactly. And such problems are magnified when the being in question is as capricious as YHWH. William Lane Craig famously argued that the slaughter of the Canaanites by the Israelites because God ordered it so. That’s fine and all, but it creates a strange problem. Is genocide moral? The answer is, yes, when God says so, or conversely, it’s not moral when God says it isn’t. Great. Happy little soldiers, following happy little orders. Now, extrapolate. Is cloning moral? The correct answer from this is, It’s moral if God says so, but it’s not moral if God says it isn’t so. So, do we have any evidence that God has said yea or nay to cloning? If it’s not in the Bible, or Apocrypha, or some other recording of God’s word, then there’s no possible way to say. One could extrapolate, just like one could extrapolate from select Bible verses that killing is immoral, but one would be wrong when it came to the Canaanites, apparently. So what you end up with is a static book full of commands that can be countermanded at any time by an ostensibly moral being. There’s no basis for forming one’s own morality on it. You can’t actually move beyond the book. If it ain’t in there, it can’t be dealt with. God has micromanaged his subordinates to the point where they’re incapable of making decisions. Anyone who’s worked under this type of manager will know exactly what I’m talking about.
So Hammy-boy thinks all morality come from the Bible, and the Bible is 100% true and without flaw. There is a restaurant in the Creation “Museum”. I wonder if they sell bacon or other pork products there? How about cheeseburgers? Shrimp or other shellfish? Are the t-shirts in the gift shop 100% pure cotton, or are they a blended fabric?
OMG! Out of curiosity, I searched for a menu for the Creation”Museum” and I found it. Hoo boy, ol’ Hammy is breaking so many Biblical laws it should guarantee him a million years in purgatory.
First off, there is a Sunday menu, so they are working on the Sabbath. Then, yes!, they DO sell cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers, AND pepperoni and cheese pizzas, as well as ham and cheddar sandwiches.
So Ken Ham cherry-picks his Bible just as all Christians do. What a hypocrite.
Cue libertarian dorks in 3…2…1…
Worse than that, his employees are doing all of this and forging his signature on all of these absurd memos. They’re the ones denying their own capacity to be moral agents. (They’re mouthing the words to make the argument, that is, but in practice of course they’re just ordinary people.) At the same time, they’re saying that’s exactly the thing we can’t do.
#1: The boss did all of that paperwork, not you, you liar.
#2: But… but… I really did fill out that form. Is there a problem? I thought that was my job.
#1: The boss is the only one who does the paperwork. Says so right here: ‘I do the paperwork –signed, Boss. dated: now’
#2: Who signs their memos with ‘Boss’ … and the word ‘signed’ .. and dating it ‘now’?
#1: The boss does, stupid. Shut up and do what the boss says.
#2: Uh… What am I supposed to do?
#1: Just sit at your desk at make yourself look busy. Now stop wasting my time. I’ve got things to do at my desk.
@27 moarscienceplz
While it’s amusing to do so, the two biblical laws you cite are OT laws that were specifically superseded by the NT. Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath, thereby overturning the death penalty for working. In addition, there is also a specific passage overturning the dietary restrictions (I think for Gentiles only, but I’m not in a position to look it up right now).
Other OT laws, like not wearing mixed fabrics, getting tattoos, etc., were not overturned, AFAIK. But Christians have NT support for not following those two little bits of nonsense. Have a bacon cheeseburger on Sunday (or more biblically, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday). It’s OK.
consciousness razor #24 wrote:
It’s probably a bit of all 3: they don’t get it; they think they don’t get it; and they think they shouldn’t want to get it. Sometimes more one way than the other, varying between and within individuals. Since God is supposed to be so much higher than ourselves, inconsistency can be seen as a form of humility. You’re right; I’m certainly not saying they’re stupid. I think the more intelligent a believer is the more interesting their elaborate excuses for simple-minded thinking will be.
To their credit, the theists who basically equate God with ‘existence’ and say that God is “the Ground of Being” usually don’t make the same “morality requires an AUTHORITY” argument bashing atheist attempts to be good. Instead, they’ll slide in a “morality requires TRANSCENDENCE” argument when bashing atheist attempts to be good.
It’s not even all that difficult to show that the basics of morality can come from evolution. After all, populations where individuals randomly go around murdering each other will tend not to survive for long. Groups that protect their children will tend to have more children and future generations. Working together has big advantages for population survival, and evolution works on populations, not individuals.
@31, Sastra
Reminds me of an anecdote of my fundamentalist days when we were taught in school how objects have color. Light bouncing off things, being absorbed, and so on.
Even though I hadn’t been taught dogma on the issue, I rejected the explanation and felt a sense that it was against my religion. I don’t recall ever having this reaction in science class for anything other than evolution.
But it was like I had some problem with an explanation for sensory experience that wasn’t magic. Like “objects simply have colors on them, and we simply see the colors”.
Sure, that tends to be a bit more nebulous and metaphorical than anything definite, like authority or power or something.
Of course, even if it’s a little more back-handed, you’re right that it is still bashing. It may not be targeted at us quite so much, but more generally at this depressing or meaningless or confusing world they think they live in, which would be better if it had some special sauce on top. Still, we do have this impoverished view which doesn’t transcend (presumably) whatever needs to be transcended, so we’d almost have to count as collateral damage in some way, since it’d be fairly miraculous if we somehow managed to be good anyway (or appreciate love, beauty, truth, meaning, or whatever it is). It’s hard to explain at least. One of their super-simple explanations would need to get a little complicated.
Anthony K, #25
Theology–even Fundie theology–does not see it that way. They (and I, in my Fundie days) would tell you that “thou shalt not kill” is the default, and exceptions can only be made by God himself based on his omniscience and, of course, his inscrutable plan. Absent a specific order to kill Canaanites, killing them would be wrong, and the specific order is given only because those Canaanites had it coming. Because child sacrifice and rampant forcible sodomy, most likely.
One thing I was wont to say, in my Fundie days, was, “If God told me to kill you, then of course I would–but don’t worry: He has to tell me personally, not through some middleman, and if I hear voices telling me to kill, I promise first to get medical confirmation whether I’m experiencing auditory hallucinations. Without clear, unambiguous orders to kill, ‘thou shalt not kill’ remains the default.”
So the analogy to soldiers is actually much stronger than you may have realized. Soldiers are expected to kill on command, without hesitation, whether it’s an enemy soldier, an unarmed civilian, or a small child–but they are also expected NOT to kill without express orders to do so. The trick with soldiers (and cops) is that what you really need is someone able to kill on command without remorse, like a sociopath, while at the same time having a well-developed conscience that prevents them from killing for personal reasons, or spite, or sport. Sociopaths are in limited supply, and sociopaths with consciences even more so, so the military tries to split the difference by dehumanizing the enemy, on the one hand, but instilling rigid obedience, on the other.
Even Fundies are capable of moving beyond the book–or we’d be reading about all the stonings in the paper. As you said, they extrapolate, and then retcon their extrapolation. Which is as biblical as the Apostle Paul, retconning a case against circumcision into the story of Abraham’s circumcision, and a case for Gentile inclusiveness into texts explicitly aimed at excluding Gentiles.
The “book that does all your thinking for you” is a myth, pretty much. It’s why that particular attack by atheists never hits home. The book does almost none of their thinking for them–it’s just a rule of the game they’re playing that they must express their views in the form of a quotation. In my experience, having been one, the homophobia (for example) is not really caused by Romans 1; it’s merely justified by an appeal to Romans 1. If they had chosen not to be homophobes, they would simply appeal to a different verse and explain Romans 1 some other way. If they’re still around in 100 years, after gay marriage is at least as accepted as interracial marriage, the majority will argue that Romans 1 was talking about temple prostitutes or some such, and will appeal to the Golden Rule to justify accepting it too.
johnharshman @ 11
The apologists seem to think that they’ve gotten around Euthyphro by claiming that their god, by its very nature is “good.” Therefore, it can never ever do evil. The only reason we atheists see a problem with drowning the planet, or killing the first born of Egypt, or massacring Midianites (save the young virgin females) is because we rely on our own moral assumptions which have been tainted by “The Fall.”
Apologist asshole (as if there are any other kind of apologist) Doug Wilson loves to use something similar when critics bring up the Yahweh’s apocryphal horrors: we are using his God’s morality to judge God, therefore “HYPOCRISY!!!”
quoth the Ham-ster:
Hmm. The last time I checked, “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes is exactly and precisely what actually does happen. So the Ham-ster’s argument here, is one of the many arguments used by Jesus-salesmen which boils down to [nods] Yep. You’re right, Mr. Ham; if there is no Absolute Morality, then the world would look exactly and precisely the way it actually does look. Which means that the observable evidence indicates there ain’t no such animal as Absolute Morality. You go, Mr. Ham! You go! As far away as possible, as quickly as you can manage, you go!
A Masked Avenger @35
Given their biases toward homosexuality, I would think that consensual “sodomy” would merit the same response from both the ancient Hebrews and modern Christians.
Is he arguing that even if God doesn’t exists, we still must pretend that he does?
Ken Ham asks, “what or who defines right from wrong?” Since Christianity doesn’t have an epistemology based on an objective theory of concepts he is probably clueless in this regard. Right and wrong are concepts, and a concept is the idea of a class whose members share a certain similarity. Definitions come from noting the essential characteristics of this similarity. But that being said I think that Ham is really asking under which concept, either right or wrong, does a particular issue fit. Ham already knows that what he believes should be called right and this is often without consideration of observational data, the very observations that lead us to the concept of right in the first place and it’s subsequent definition.
TW: reference to rape.
No argument. Although I’m sure you could get a rousing debate going around the question, “Exactly how bad do you have to be to merit genocide?” You could probably get general agreement that “everyone raping everyone else all the time” would clear the bar. Something approximating that is about what Fundies picture right before the great flood, which is why it was unquestionably justified for God to drown ’em all out.
@35 A Masked Avenger:
Thanks for that perspective. I have very little personal experience with fundamentalists, though I do have some distant family members who are hard line Catholics (and then some fundie inlaws, but we don’t interact with them much.)
I do know that fundamentalists are a lot more nuanced than the arguments they use against atheists would lead one to believe, and you summed up the Game of Quotes well.
Libby Anne had an interesting discussion recently about the implications of the story of God telling Abraham to kill his son, because some religions don’t assume the only evil is disobedience to the nebulous god-authority. Talking Back to God
Ken Ham and his ilk are Sylvia Brownes adorned in crucifixes and guilt.
That only succeeds in proving that the omnipotent God suffers from a severe lack of imagination.
Lol @cr 29:
OT: I had that boss. After a third revision I snapped back with “then you can damn well write your own letters and I’ll get back to doing my actual work.”
We had a tense working relationship.
@30Kevin Kehres
Without going down the rabbit hole of what’s actually historical (if anything) in the text, what appears to be going on here is Jesus participating in the debate at the time of how diaspora Jews who didn’t have access to the temple (which probably had been torn down when the text was written) should behave. The idea was to keep to the spirit of some of these confusing laws like “don’t cook a kid in its mothers milk” without going crazy and without even knowing what the hell the law was really about.
The healing on the Sabbath is a comment on a specific debate. Everyone agreed that doctors should work on Sunday, and everyone agreed that emergency medicine was required on Saturday. The question was whether it was acceptable to work on the Sabbath to alleviate 24 hours worth of pain. Jesus is saying yes. He argues that he knows the purpose of this law, and that said purpose was less important than alleviating pain. The counterargument was that we don’t really know the meaning of these rules and that we should play it safe. The text even mentions that the guy isn’t going to get any worse in one day.
The Christians who quote this story seem to be putting it forth as an example of dumb things Jews do to make people suffer. But the Jews see it as obeying the will of God but still getting the sick man his medical care.
The food ruling came in a dream, and I don’t believe the historical Peter had such a dream for one instant. But the center of that one seems to be that the food laws don’t do anything except make Jews special, and therefore are pointless for Gentiles.
The upshot of this is that the story was originally about keeping the law sensibly, not about overturning the law. Christians certainly have churned it all up and interpretations have varied from living like Orthodox Jews to doing whatever the hell you want and letting Jesus forgive you. So there’s not much potential for moral compass points in there.
Sastra:
Yes, that’s the belief. It’s unfortunate that when it comes to the Christian god, reading the bible puts paid to that moral goodness bit.
It also bothers me that there are people out there who do murder, rape, pillage, and plunder, because / claiming their magic sky faeries said to do so. And that those crimes are therefore the “correct” thing to do…
consciousness razor #34 wrote:
Back when I was Spiritual But Not Religious and self-identified as a Transcendentalist, I thought of atheists as people who didn’t feel or appreciate love and beauty very much. How could they, since they didn’t think there was anything ‘higher’ than cold reason? The Argument from Beauty was the last one that impressed me.
My Straw Man eventually fell apart. I suspect part of the reason it did is that I lacked both a religious upbringing and a close community reinforcing the need to reify abstractions or lose them. But I saw how solid that ‘common sense’ view of the “unspiritual” is from the side that values mystical truths. Atheists are stiff and unyielding, hard and negative individuals. The caricature might bend a little for accomodationists, but only on the assumption that by respecting faith they’re secretly seeking God.
I sometimes think the major difference between the fundamentalists is that the Ground-of-Being ones refuse to try to ‘convert’ atheists. That’s got a dark side, though.
@ blf #49
It’s not so much that they are “correct” but that with an externally imposed absolute morality or rule of behavior you have no personal responsibility for your actions. Choose the imposed morality that allows you to do what you want to do, be it cutting off heads, kidnapping girls for wives, burning heretics at the stake, or simply hating a specified group, and answer complaints with “Don’t argue with me, I’m not responsible, take it up with (name of deity), it’s his law!”
While it’s the perfect defense, it usually fails in a secular court.
Many people know about Ecclesiastes 3 because of the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” with lyrics from the first few verses. But few know the last verses of the chapter.
18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.
19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
22 Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? –KJV
You may be surprised to learn that there is some contradictory verses in the middle, or maybe not.
Religion has its benefits and harms. One of the major harms that it does is to teach a false theory of ethics.
Religious folk misunderstand morality at its roots. Religion teaches a child’s view of ethics, that “being good” means “obeying your parent”. Just as religious faith is believing what you are told, so religious morality is doing what you are told. Religious morality consists of obeying the alleged will of God, an invisible “Cosmic Parent”, as reported by your chosen authority. But obedience is not morality, and morality is not obedience. We can all think of famous people who did good things while rebelling against authority, and others who did evil things while obeying authority.
Religious folk may be Good Samaritans or suicide bombers, it depends entirely on what their chosen authority orders them to do. If a believer, or a community of same, wishes to make war or keep slaves or oppress women, all they have to do is persuade themselves that their god approves. This seems not to be hard, and no god has ever popped up to tell believers that they were wrong. They do not have a code of morality except by the convenience of the priesthood. What they have is a code of obedience, which is not the same thing.
Adult morality is a means of maintaining peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors. If you want peaceful relations, don’t kill, steal, lie, or break agreements. As Shakespeare wrote: “It needs no ghost, Milord, come from the grave, to tell us this.”
Living beings evolved by natural selection are going to value the health of their families, “inclusive fitness”, where “health” is the ABILITY to survive, and “family” is “all who share your genes, to the degree that they share your genes.” Their desires are shaped by natural selection, and inclusive fitness is what natural selection selects for.
Social animals, who survive by cooperating in groups, have a “natural” standard of ethics: The Good is that which leads to health, The Right is that which leads to peace. A “good person” is a desirable neighbor, from the point of view of people who seek to live in peace and raise families.
PZ – I think you may have missed the point of his claim that atheist morality borrows from the bible. He’s basing his claim on the notion that A) the bible is the source of all morality period and B) the belief that the morals of society (that he agrees with) have a specific biblical origin. I don’t think he’s claiming that you went and looked in a bible to get your morality and simply disagreed with the rest. In a way I think his argument is even stupider than that: the bible is the source of your moral actions whether you like it or not. If the bible is the source of all morality, then your moral actions are biblically based, therefore atheists get their morality from the bible. That’s his line of reasoning. Of course, he’s wrong, since there are plenty of reasons you could come to the conclusion that killing is immoral and ought to be avoided. But that would require thinking, and Ham isn’t particularly famous for that.