Let’s review what you need in your worldview in order to have a rationally grounded system of morality.

You need 5 things:

1) Objective moral values

There needs to be a way to distinguish what is good from what is bad. For example, the moral standard might specify that being kind to children is good, but torturing them for fun is bad. If the standard is purely subjective, then people could believe anything and each person would be justified in doing right in their own eyes. Even a “social contract” is just based on people’s opinions. So we need a standard that applies regardless of what people’s individual and collective opinions are.

2) Objective moral duties

Moral duties (moral obligations) refer to the actions that are obligatory based on the moral values defined in 1). Suppose we spot you 1) as an atheist. Why are you obligated to do the good thing, rather than the bad thing? To whom is this obligation owed? Why is rational for you to limit your actions based upon this obligation when it is against your self-interest? Why let other people’s expectations decide what is good for you, especially if you can avoid the consequences of their disapproval?

3) Moral accountability

Suppose we spot you 1) and 2) as an atheist. What difference does it make to you if you just go ahead and disregard your moral obligations to whomever? Is there any reward or punishment for your choice to do right or do wrong? What’s in it for you?

4) Free will

In order for agents to make free moral choices, they must be able to act or abstain from acting by exercising their free will. If there is no free will, then moral choices are impossible. If there are no moral choices, then no one can be held responsible for anything they do. If there is no moral responsibility, then there can be no praise and blame. But then it becomes impossible to praise any action as good or evil.

5) Ultimate significance

Finally, beyond the concept of reward and punishment in 3), we can also ask the question “what does it matter?”. Suppose you do live a good life and you get a reward: 1000 chocolate sundaes. And when you’ve finished eating them, you die for real and that’s the end. In other words, the reward is satisfying, but not really meaningful, ultimately. It’s hard to see how moral actions can be meaningful, ultimately, unless their consequences last on into the future.

Theism rationally grounds all 5 of these. Atheism cannot ground any of them.

Atheist objective morality

Let’s take a look at an atheist professor of philosophy, and see how good he is at rationally grounding the 5 points above. Remember, we’re not interested in his likes or dislikes. We’re not interested in his feelings. We’re not interested in his opinions. We’re interested in knowing what sort of MORALITY atheism makes rational for atheists. What is reasonable, if the universe is an accident, and human beings are nothing but random collections of atoms?

Let’s ask this distinguished professor of atheist morality:

Stephen Kershnar is a distinguished teaching professor in the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Fredonia and an attorney. He focuses on applied ethics and political philosophy. Kershnar has written one hundred articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as abortion, adult-child sex, hell, most valuable player, pornography, punishment, sexual fantasies, slavery, and torture.

This is a lot better stuff to think about than the stupid things that Christians think about. Love? Charity? Self-Denial? Self-Sacrifice? Those are stupid things to think about.

He’s written books against moral responsibility, against the pro-life movement, and against gratitude towards veterans.

He also defended atheism in a formal debate.

The Federalist reported on his views:

Stephen Kershnar is a professor at State University of New York at Fredonia, and a pedophilia apologist.

Here’s Kershnar on video saying that an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.

[…]He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”

Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.

[…]Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids.

He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.” His perspective is backed up by podcast host Thaddeus Russel, who makes an equally monstrous argument when he says “all a child’s life is, is coercion by adults … often to make the child do something for the adult’s pleasure only.”

It’s also telling that these dangerous viewpoints have found their way into the mainstream through left-wing outlets. At one point, Russel boasts that he authored an article in The Daily Beast that argued for lowering consent laws.

Thaddeus Russel says this:

Black kids at school tackled me to the ground and lay on top of me until I thought I would suffocate when I mentioned that I was an atheist.

Do you think this is unusual for atheists? We just had a case where Democrats in Virginia were covering up the rape of a child and having the child’s father arrested. The same things happen in Canada. Last November, another LGBT activist professor was trying to normalize pedophilia.

If I had to pick the atheist capital of the United States, I’d pick Seattle. The voters there elected Ed Murray to be their mayor. Seattle voters loved that he had been the driving force behind same-sex marriage in the state. Atheists were proud of their state for legalizing same-sex marriage. They cheer for the annihilation of Judeo-Christian morality in our laws, and in our culture. It emerged later that Murray was a child molester.

Megan Basham is an evangelical Christian writer who has gotten my attention by her challenges to anti-conservative evangelicals, such as David French, Russell Moore, Tim Keller, etc. She’s written some amazing articles for the Daily Wire, but her latest is the most important one yet. In it, she talks about how Biden Democrats used woke evangelicals to spread propaganda to conservative churches.

Here’s the article:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

[…] Stetzer is… the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

[…]Stetzer… ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

Megan has a lot more to say about other pious, charismatic useful idiots in the article.

Joe Carter

Here’s Joe Carter, who writes for the woke evangelical publication “The Gospel Coalition”:

Certainly The Gospel Coalition, a publication largely written for and by pastors, didn’t probe beyond the “facts” Collins’ offered or consider any conflicts of interest the NIH director might have had before publishing several essays that cited him as almost their lone source of information. As with CT, one article by Gospel Coalition editor Joe Carter linked the reasonable hypothesis that the virus might have been human-made with wilder QAnon fantasies. It then lectured readers that spreading such ideas would damage the church’s witness in the world.

Joe Carter has been far-left for some time. Another person who climbed the church hierarchy through piety and charisma, but doesn’t know anything about the real world.

Russell Moore

If you’re looking for the truth about how to handle a virus, you won’t get it from a pious, charismatic pastor:

[T]he Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

While a webinar featuring Collins and then-ERLC-head Russell Moore largely centered, again, on the importance of pastors convincing church members to get vaccinated, the discussion also moved on to the topic of masks. With Moore nodding along, Collins held up a basic, over-the-counter cloth square, “This is not a political statement,” he asserted. “This is not an invasion of your personal freedom…This is a life-saving medical device.”

You can read more about this in the latest announcement from the Centers for Disease Control. I’ve talked about Russell Moore often on this blog. I’m not sure how someone this far to the left was able to climb to the top rungs of the Southern Baptist hierarchy.

Tim Keller

Megan writes:

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

Haven’t paid any attention to him recently because of his views on evolution, socialism, and critical race theory.

Hugh Ross

Although I am an old-Earth creationist like Hugh Ross, I was surprised to see him endorse a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT theistic evolutionist like Francis Collins:

I don’t think anyone would call Hugh Ross a very politically-aware person, but this was ridiculous. Francis Collins isn’t automatically a good person just because he has elite degrees and political power. Elite degrees and political power are great, but they don’t automatically make you a good Christian. Hugh Ross has never been very intelligent about policy or politics. He was careless about Collins and it is a huge mistake.

Further reading

If you don’t know much about Francis Collins, you should read this article about him from Evolution News. They go over his record on abortion, experimenting on aborted babies, LGBT activism and theistic evolution.

Oh, and here are some other names Megan names in a tweet:

D. French is David French, who used to write for National Review, which has also lurched to the left.

Please don’t listen to these people. They’re wolves.