Tag Archives: Moral Duties

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

MUST-READ: How feminism’s war against men ends up hurting women

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From the The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

There’s been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That’s just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there’s a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with “some college” are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970.

[…]Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 62% of associate’s degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can’t find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.

Couple the education gap with the current economic “man-cession”—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to “marry down”?

As I’ve written about before, the reason why men are not able to do well in school is because they are discriminated against by the teachers, legislators and educrats. There are almost no male teachers. Men do better with male teachers. But there is a fear among educrats of male teachers getting near children, so boys end up suffering. Affirmative action keeps many men from attending college. And then of course in the workplace, companies have quotas to fill, which shuts even more men out of jobs.

Children need to have a mother and father, and the father typically gets his authority and his role by being the primary earner. What women have done is that they have decided that it is a better idea to compete with the man for money. But this undermines the man’s authority in the home. Why would a man get married only to have his influence diluted? The threat of false charges of domestic violence or of a unilateral divorce can also easily be used to control and silence him. Why try to lead a family if you are going to be silenced and coerced?

More importantly, the more that a woman focuses on vocational skills, the less time she has for reading about marriage, education, economics and parenting, e.g. – Jennifer Roback Morse, Laura Schlessinger, Maggie Gallagher, Stephen Baskerville, etc. If a man is a software engineer, the last thing he wants in the home is another software engineer. A mother needs to teach the children everything they need to know to succeed and to have a relationship with God that will stay with them as they grow. And she must also be able to talk to her husband about his interests, like science, economics, politics, theology and apologetics.

And it’s not just a question of having the right knowledge. It’s a question of character. She has to make choices and have experiences all along the way to build up the capacity to care, nurture and communicate. That means actually doing things that cause her to become comfortable caring for others even when it goes against her own selfish interests. Being selfish disqualifies a women from being marriage material. Instead of being focused on making money, women should be studying how husbands and children work.

And I think this is why women are so anxious to throw themselves at men sexually. They are trying to get men to love them without actually having to care about men, marriage or children. They don’t want to have to take on the traditional role of mother and wife, which is what causes a man to love and need a woman in the first place. But a woman cannot make a man love her by tricking him with sex. Women can only make men love them by being willing to encourage and support him in his plan to serve God and to raise children who also know God and serve God. It’s a relationship, not a slot machine.

NOTE: When I say that women should be more focused on children, I mean while the children are not yet all in school. Once they are all in school, then women can go back to work full-time, or part-time, or work out of the home, whatever they want to do.

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News

France introduces bill to require boards of directors to be 40% female

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Story from the UK Times.

Excerpt:

The French version of the glass ceiling has just been cracked open by parliamentary vote. With the backing of President Sarkozy’s administration, the National Assembly last night passed a bill that aims to force big companies to appoint women to 40 percent of their seats on the board.

[…]Norway introduced a 40 percent rule in 2002 when women accounted for only 6 per cent of board seats there. Spain has also just passed a similar law.

The measure will mean an upheaval because the boards of France’s top companies remain male bastions, along with those of southern Europe (see chart below). Women occupy just 10.5 percent of board seats in the 650 publicly quoted companies to which the new law will apply. Corporations will have six years to reach the 40 percent mark. After that, all board appointments will be voided if they do not maintain at least a 60-40 share between men and women.

Women today seem to prefer a pay check and government social programs over relationships with husbands and children. A relationship means that the other person may say or do things that hurt you, and that they may make demands on you to act morally or to think rationally or to take care of others. I have heard the demands of men and children described as “harassment” by women, and compared unfavorably with workplace relationships. For some reason, women have decided that the workplace is less “harassment” than the family.

Women may still marry for the spectacle of the wedding. They may still have babies to play with and show off. (But the man should change the diapers). But the willingness to accept the demands of relationships is gone. Today’s women think that life should be about their happiness all the time, and that no one should ever confront them with moral judgments and moral obligations. So a husband’s demands for a woman to spend less will be met with a unilateral divorce. And a child’s demands for attention will be met with day care.

Today’s women are just not interested in communication, relationships, commitments, and nurturing.

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