Polemics

Psychology Today features atheists who think that they are moral

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I noticed that someone had posted a link to me from this post, so I left the comment below. (I made a few tiny changes below, but it’s basically the same as what I submitted). So far, the long comment has not been published, probably because it was mean, snarky and TOO LONG! So, I’ll show the comment below, but first here’s a word about the post itself. I left a new comment linking to this post, and we’ll see if that one stays up. I understand why they would not approve my comment, if they don’t – and so will you when you read below.

The post on Psychology Today

Notice the title “The Many Voices of the Happily Godless”. It shows two things about morality on atheism. One – that there is safety in numbers. Atheists get their standard of right and wrong from watching other people. That’s why they hate religion and want it banished from the public square, and why they resent Christians voting. They think that right and wrong is decided by counting votes, just like in Nazi Germany or pre-abolition England. So long as lots of people agree, then whatever the society decides is right for them, e.g. – abortion. Cultural relativism.

Second, the purpose of life on atheism is not to be a good person – there is no such thing as good and evil on atheism. They are trying to be happy. So they can define abortion as “good” and “moral” because murdering the weak isn’t wrong so long as it makes them happy. That’s what they mean by morality – what a person chooses to do in order to have feelings of happiness. The very concept of doing something because it is RIGHT, independently of what anyone thinks – as with abolitionists and pro-lifers and defenders of children’s rights with respect to traditional marriage – is foreign to them. (I know that some atheists are pro-life, but most aren’t!)

So they basically re-invent an accidental universe and an ethic of subjective selfish hedonism and then call that “morality”, even though it is the complete opposite of morality. And then they cloister together in the ivory tower with a few sheltered social studies majors who agree with them, read only the New York Times, and watch only MSNBC, listen only to NPR, and then titter nervously to each other about the immoral masses who think that unborn children have a right to life that trumps the “right” to have irresponsible sex and then escape the (financial) consequences of their own risky behavior.

That’s atheist “morality”. There is no objective right and wrong, and no rational argumentation about morality – morality on atheism is an illusion, as atheist Michael Ruse says. You can do anything that you are powerful enough to do in order to have good feelings. Because you can. And you try to pass laws and elect candidates to silence anyone who makes you feel bad for being selfish. And if people disagree with you, then you use the law to silence them, as at the University of Calgary with the pro-life students.

I am not saying that atheists MUST do evil, I am saying that the only reason they have not to do evil is because they can gain pleasure or avoid pain. And that is not morality, that’s just self-interest. Hedonism.

The comment I left that they did not publish

So anyway, I left the comment below and it didn’t appear. I wrote this in a single long edit and didn’t spell-check it or proof-read it before I hit post. This is from the hip, so I hope it makes sense to you.

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It’s not like this is even a close debate, by the way. The concept of rationally-grounded prescriptive morality is totally alien to an atheistic worldview.

1) There are no OBJECTIVE moral values on atheism, moral values independent of what humans think

2) There are no OBJECTIVE moral duties on atheism, moral duties independent of what humans think

3) There is no effective MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY on atheism, especially for powerful committed atheists like Stalin who can escape detection and consequences

4) There is no libertarian free will on atheism, due to materialism and biological determinism. You need the ability to choose in order to make MORAL CHOICES.

5) There is no ultimate significance to our actions on atheism, which undermines the rationality of self-sacrificial moral behavior when it goes against self-interest.

Self-interested hedonism is not “morality”, it’s self-interested hedonism. See the difference? You are not going to get people sacrificing their happiness for the lives of others on atheism, as with Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce, because self-sacrifice is not rational on atheism. Self-interested hedonism is rational on atheism. The only reason to do anything on atheism is because it makes you feel good or to escape punishment from your society. That’s not morality, it’s the law of the jungle. Morality is sacrificing your life to free slaves when it gives you no feelings of happiness to do so, because you believe that every human being was born with a right to life, and a duty to know God personally.

Atheists can say the words “I’m moral” but what they mean is “I conform my behavior to my own personal preferences or to my society’s arbitrary fashions in this time and place when it coincides with my selfishness or when I am sure I won’t caught”. There is no real way we ought to be on atheism. The universe is an accident and so are we. Doing what makes you happy is not morality – it’s selfishness. Morality means doing the right thing, especially when it goes against your self-interest. But in an accidental universe without design, there is no way we ought to be. You do what you can get away with. That’s atheist “morality”.

And that’s why atheistic communists murdered 100 million people in communist regimes last century, tens of millions more with abortion, and tens of millions more on environmentalist overpopulation fads like banning DDT. Just look at the arguments and count the bodies. If you can’t ground an objective right to life, then these things are possible. Killing those who diminish your happiness is consistent with atheism – survival of the fittest. It is NOT consistent with the teachings of Jesus – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.

Atheism is a psychological disfunction that results when a person jettisons the demands of their conscience because they want to pursue pleasure in an unrestrained way, or because they expect God to make them happy and he doesn’t. That’s how people become atheists – it’s just immaturity. Atheists invent unscientific myths like the steady-state universe, the multiverse, aliens causing the origin of life, materialist conceptions of mind, unobservable pre-Cambrian fossils, etc. later, in order to disguise the pre-rational rebellion against God and the demands of the objective moral law. The whole point of atheism is to create an excuse for immoral, self-interested hedonistic behavior.

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I wrote a series of posts a while back in which I suggested 13 questions that you can use to understand WHERE atheists are coming from when it comes to morality. I also defined the minimal requirements for objective, rational, prescriptive morality, and explained why none of the requirements are grounded rationally by atheism, but ALL are grounded by Christian theism.

Lastly, you can look at just a few reasons why God exists, and some responses to just a few common objections.

A few reasons for Christian theism

Responses to a few common objections to Christian theism

Some debates on God and morality

News

How well did a government-run green energy policy work in Spain?

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Story here from Pajamas Media. (H/T Stuart Scheidernman)

Keep in mind that the socialists under Zapatero are running Spain now, and that’s where this green energy policy came from. Is it working out for socialist Spain?

Excerpt:

Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives.

[…]Unsurprisingly for a governmental take on a flagship program, the report takes pains to minimize the extent of the economic harm. Yet despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.

The government report does not expressly confirm the highest-profile finding of the non-governmental report: that Spain’s “green economy” program cost the country 2.2 jobs for every job “created” by the state. However, the figures published in the government document indicate they arrived at a job-loss number even worse than the 2.2 figure from the independent study.

Spain is giving up their green energy / green jobs initiative. What does Obama learn from Spain’s failure?

Excerpt:

This document is not a public report. Spanish media has referred to its existence in recent weeks though, while Bloomberg and the Washington Examiner have noted the impact: Spain is now forced to jettison its plans — Obama’s model — for a “green economy.”

Remarkably, these items have received virtually no media attention.

An item which has been covered widely, however, is that President Obama is now pressuring Spain to turn off its spigot of public debt in the name of averting a situation similar to that of Greece.

Also covered widely is Obama’s promotion of the American Power Act — the legislation which would replicate Spain’s current situation in the United States.

Put simply, Obama is currently promoting a policy in the U.S. which is based on a policy that he wishes to see Spain abandon.

Why can’t we learn from Spain’s failure and avoid making the same mistakes they did? Is that too much to ask?

News

Fiscally conservative Canada campaigns against global bank tax

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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Story from Breitbart.

Excerpt:

Canada will “resist” a bank tax, Industry Minister Tony Clement said Tuesday as ministers fanned out across the world to raise opposition to the proposal for avoiding another financial crisis.

“Canada is, and will remain, opposed to a tax that would penalize financial institutions that remained strong and prosperous while many of the world’s banks failed,” Clement told a press conference with Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon.

“We will resist the bank tax here at home and we seek to convince other heads of government of the virtue of our position,” he said as senior ministers echoed his message in Mumbai, Beijing and Washington.

Attempts to reach international agreement on coordinated bank taxes at last month’s G20 and IMF meetings ran aground.

Nations including Canada and Brazil, whose banking sectors emerged largely unscathed from the financial crisis, objected to the plan, favoring higher capital reserve requirements instead.

[…]Clement said the bank tax would “encourage risky behavior” if it is used to create a bank bailout fund and “reward bad behavior” of those institutions responsible for the recent financial crisis in the first place.

As well, it would “unduly burden” Canadian banks and put them at a “competitive disadvantage” to other financial institutions.

“This tax would reach into consumers’ pockets and punish our financial institutions which have taken precautions to avoid the very turmoil that is afflicting other parts of the globe,” Clement lamented.

Stephen Harper is a fiscal conservative. He knows that low interest rates are bad, so he created tax-free savings accounts to get people to work and save their money. And he knows that people who buy houses need to be able to pay for them, and his banking policies reflect that. There is no Democrat-sponsored “Community Reinvestment Act” in Canada to allow the socialist mafia (ACORN) to pressure private banks into making risky loans. And there are no Democrats taking political contributions while blocking attempts to investigate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And there are no bank bailouts!

The Conservative Party of Canada keeps its banking sector squeaky clean. They even plan to cut spending! And the Canadian people support fiscal conservatism. That’s why they aren’t facing the mess we are facing. And they have lower unemployment, too – 8.1% compared to our 9.9%. Canada is kicking our tails! How can this be? How did they manage to elect an economist, while we are stuck with this perpetually-bowing flibbertigibbet and his legions of bloviating boffins, each more corrupt and incompetent than the last? Democrats have no real-life experience! They just had rich parents!

Look at this article from the Financial Post.

Excerpt:

“In Canada, there were no taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions, so we believe there is no justification for levies on banks and financial institutions,” Harper said at a news conference following meetings with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

[…]Canada and the EU are in the midst of negotiating an ambitious trade deal. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was launched at the 2009 Canada-EU summit and to date, three rounds of negotiations have taken place. There are at least two more to go over the next year.

The deal will give Canada greater access to the markets of the EU’s member countries and will strengthen an economic relationship that is already worth $75-billion in trade. The EU is Canada’s second-largest trading partner after the United States and is also Canada’s second-largest source of direct foreign investment, putting $162-billion into Canada in 2009.

This is grown-up fiscal policy. Government should stay out of the mortgage-lending industry, and sign as many free-trade deals as possible. The exact opposite of what the Obama administration is doing.