Now, I wanted to direct you to Sam Harris' new article: The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos. For those of you unawares, Harris published The End of Faith, and an excellent essay, An Atheist Manifesto, both of which I have linked to in our "Reading Rainbow" section of the sidebar. Please send me suggestions and requests to add content to that portion of our sidebar, and I can link it as your own suggestion, or just an anonymous one. Thanks!
I also want to direct you to: The 10 Commandments -- Updated for a Modern Age
And get your response to this short quote:
The God of the Crusaders sent them to kill Muslims. The God of the Catholics had them kill scientists. The God of the Puritans told them to kill witches. The Hindu god is OK with killing cow-tippers. The God of the evangelists tells them to kill pro-choicers. The God of the Islamists wants them to kill just about everybody else.We've probably all heard the trite tripe about Stalin and Hitler enough to hurt our heads, so what do you make of this assessment? Thoughts, comments?Pity, then, the poor atheist. With no god to tell him whom to kill, he can only practice peace on earth, good will toward men.
Lawrence Manes
It's a great essay. Another point I sometimes hear is that if you say morality is what God says it is, then you don't have objective morality. You have morality based on God's whims.
ReplyDeleteFor reading rainbow: The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, especially chapter 10, which has studies showing that atheists behave just as morally as anyone else. It's on amazon.com if you need the names of the four authors.
Anon,
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by, and the pithy comment.
What you referred to with morality is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma, and is a pretty strong argument against derived morality from any god/God/religion.
The Crusaders were Catholics (deemed by many as Papists commanding false doctrines not in the Bible as finally protested in the OPEN against by Europeans during the Reformation) who were going to remove Muslim invaders who they deemed as following a false prophet/Caravan trader that wrote the Koran that was basically plagarized from what he had learned from Jews and Christians, molded into his own dogma which he said came from an angel). Some of the same Catholic leadership and Papists were dogmatic against certain scientists, but scientists and tradesmen within the Protestant movement were the ones that brought almost all of the science and engineering paradigm from which we have piggybacked off of today. Not Catholics. The Puritan group that killed the witches in Salem etc. were a shortlived group following some goofy legalists. Muslims have the potential to annilate infidels, but only a few million of them have the stomach to use mentally disabled suicide bombers(someone gullible enough to believe they will be with beautiful virgins after killing a lot of people, even young babies)to take over the earth. Atheists can do whatever they want as long as they can get away with it, because once they get past man, they have no god to punish them. They can be good or bad depending on what they want. I say "entrust yourself to no man for I know what is within man". Guess who taught that?
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