The Atheist Blogger

Today’s article was written by Luis Dias, a blog subscriber.

Christians and other religious people often use the moral argument not only as evidence of a deity, but also as a philosophical weapon against atheism, and the argument, though never made explicit, implicitly goes as follows:

• God is the Creator of Morals
• Atheists deny existence of God, therefore
• The atheists’ utopia is an amoral society

They obviously cite Stalin and Pol Pot’s example to strengthen this idiocy. Further more, they say, without a divine reference, an infinite guardian of values of right and wrong, atheists are left dumbfounded and such a godless society eventually recedes to the stone age, and this is where they even bring the 2nd law of thermodynamics and equate it to the theology of the original sin (!)

Apart from the implicit circular reasoning of it which could be teleported to any kind of silly argument, like for instance:

• God is the Creator of milk
• Atheists deny the existence of God, therefore
• There’s nothing stopping “milk” of degenerating to a poison. (remember the 2nd law!!)
• Milk isn’t poison, therefore God exists, QED.

It’s a very popular fallacy. I’ll generalize it to make the mistake even clearer:

• God is the sole structure of all things
• Atheists deny the existence of God
• Absent the sole structure, the cosmos collapses instantly

This would only be true if, and only if, there wouldn’t be any other structure lying around unknown or just plainly ignored by theists that make sure that things don’t fall apart, but rather, thrive and evolve. In fact, there is nothing but hearsay to prove that God is indeed such structure.

In the fairy tale world, morals would exist apart from humans, eternally defined by God, and humans would only discover (not invent) a few bits about it from now and then because of God’s good will. Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever to the existence of these morals outside of human existence. It’s only perfectly reasonable to affirm that morals are man’s made, just like potatoes, lemons and cows are. The key word to all this is of course Evolution. There’s a reason why Dawkins is constantly evoking Darwin’s work as the most extraordinary idea ever made, and that’s because it works on almost every process that has time to generate new iterations and death to kill the bad ones. This is true in life’s evolution, it’s true on the artificial selection of the animals and vegetables that were evolved to fit our own tastes and biological needs, but it is also true in the ideas that mankind evolved.

Morality is among these ideas. The only ingredients you’ll ever need to generate morals are:

• A somewhat intelligent species
• Time
• Death

Natural Selection does the rest. It probably begins when people realize other people’s death and suffering and are able to understand that it isn’t exactly the kind of thing they desire for themselves. If they see a murder or a theft, they are able to think “what if it was against me?”, and the Golden Rule begins to generate and evolve by itself. People don’t kill because they recognize other’s as equals to them and don’t like the idea of being killed. Same as theft, treating others well, lying, etc. A society that foster these ideas thrives, the ones who don’t end up collapsing on their own.

Usually, people admire how well the world is aligned according to our needs, but the real reason isn’t obvious, due to our limited lifespan, which is that We live upon the shoulders of our ancestors’ hard work and struggle to build the structures of our world, and upon the failures of those seeking destruction, greed, and malice.

Natural Selection isn’t perfect and it won’t always choose the best option. It will choose what survives. No wonder then that irrational beliefs are just as common as the Golden Rule. One common trait is to define a certain “characteristic” of the perpetrator and generalize that people who share these characteristics are certainly just as bad, as in “The murderer killed because he was black, let’s get rid of blacks”. We can all recognize this racism, “This society suffers in the hands of the Jews”, or more subtle examples, as in “That for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”, from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The underlying message is clear, either you people bow down to God or you are eventually bound to become manic psychopaths.

Fortunately though, there is another idea that tries to really discern what’s better and what’s worse faster than Natural Selection or Religion will ever do. It’s called Reason. It dispenses with all the fairy tales and all the myths of our history. It fuels itself out of reality, to observe what is going on, to measure it, to hypothesize, test and conclude. It fuels itself from debate, battle of ideas, and a passion to discover the truth, humility and patience.

As a bonus, I leave you with other very interesting lines from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which I am sure will provoke a healthy discussion ;).

• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”
• “Thus the Greeks of classical times were in moral questions influenced rather by non-religious conceptions such as that of aidos (natural shame) than by fear of the gods; while one great religious system, namely Buddhism, explicitly taught the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God. To these arguments we reply, first: that the savages of today are not primitives, but degenerates. It is the merest superstition to suppose that these degraded races can enlighten us as to what were the beliefs of man in his primitive state. It is among civilized races, where man has developed normally, that we must seek for knowledge as to what is natural to man.”
• “that for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”
• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”

An interesting collection of articles showing that:

• “Abstinence Only” doesn’t work.
• Christianity corrupts good morals unlike their claim that they created them.
• Too much religion is dangerous.
• Christian divorce rates are much higher than Atheist ones.
• 75% of born again Christians are regular liars.
• People’s lives aren’t transformed by Christianity.

I wrote this paper for an English class defining the term “atheism” and figured it would be appropriate here.

Atheism: Belief in Nature and Humanity

I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

said George H.W. Bush to a reporter in 1998 (O’Hair). Although the veracity of this quote is somewhat in doubt, this quote illustrates the view held by many about atheists and the importance of addressing the issue.  Largely misunderstood, atheists are often happy, joyful people who live fulfilled, moral, humanitarian lives.  Unfortunately however, it seems that few in American society really understand what it means to be atheist.  Some people believe that atheism is actually an anti-religious position, and some would go as far as to say that atheists hate god or even America.  George Smith comments on the situation, noting that

The atheist is pitted against morality itself, and the struggle between belief in a god and godlessness is viewed as a struggle between good and evil.

Others believe that atheism is a misnomer and that atheists should correctly call themselves agnostics.  The truth is that atheism is the absence of a belief in the supernatural or the rejection of the notion of using a deity to explain natural phenomenon.  More specifically, atheism is the belief that all observations ever made by man have a natural cause and will ultimately be explained by scientific principles.  Atheism is not the same as agnosticism and is not an anti-religious persuasion, but rather a belief in humanity and our ability to ultimately understand our universe.  By understanding the real meaning of the terms “atheist” or “atheism,” one is better equipped to engage in meaningful discourse with atheists and to deal with any prejudices one might have toward those of different belief systems.

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Due to recent discussions on my blog post Answering “ed”, I’ve felt it necessary to clarify a few of the points I made when responding to the comments made by ed. A lot of the things I wrote were not explained well enough since I hadn’t had the time to sit down and think out my words properly. Before I do this though, I should add this simple “disclaimer”:

I am not, in any way (academically or otherwise) a sociologist and I have never studied sociology. I am however, a freethinker, and as such have formed by ideas on the origins of morality merely on what I have read, combined with my own reasoned thinking. As a freethinker, I invite anyone to criticize and even disprove my points, as long as you have decent enough evidence to suggest otherwise.

Now I’ve got that out the way, I’ll begin.

Christians love to claim that the Bible brought morality into the world, and that without God, we would all be treacherous murdering bastards (to use the term lightly). This is simply not the case, and if it were, we simply wouldn’t be here today. Can you imagine a world without morality? People would kill people simply for the fun of it, we would steal, insult, rape, and torture. Not just certain individuals…but everyone. The outcome? Extinction.

Yet supposedly this world already existed, and not too long ago either. In fact, if we go back about 2000 years, we should find ourselves in the middle of a civil war between every member of the human race. What we do find however, is a relatively peaceful society, prone to the occasional conflict, but on the whole quite sophisticated both socially and technologically. The Bible will not be seen for at least another 200 years or so (in its current format), and yet we see murderers being executed along with thieves. Some form of morality is in place here, so where does it come from?

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