Tag Archives: Morality

Podcasts

Debate on whether atheists can be good without God

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A great debate on whether atheists can make any sense of morality without God grounding objective moral standards. This one should be very good for atheists to listen to.

The MP3 file is here.

This is part two of last week’s discussion about the RichardDawkins.net atheist who converted. Listen to that part first if you want.

I feel a bit bad about this because it is clear that one factor that works to convert people to Christianity is that Christians can exhibit self-sacrificial love to others and atheists are basically at the mercy of their own selfishness. They just cannot behave morally when it goes against their self-interest, and that is SAD. Anyway, I felt badly because I began to worry about whether I have been as loving as possible while explaining Christianity to others.

Here is my entire series of posts explaining why self-sacrificial morality is not rational, if atheism is true.

On a related topic, I think Christians can also distinguish themselves from atheists and other religions in the way that men and women relate romantically. In Christianity, there is the tradition of chivalry, courtship and romantic love. The Christian Bible requires that husbands love their wives to the point of dying for them. This is lacking Islamic cultures, and not required in Hindu cultures.

But this lack of romantic love is also a problem in the feminist West, where women eschew chastity, marriage and children. Instead, women here have empowered the state to act as a replacement for husbands/fathers. The more that the state does for women, the less a really good man can distinguish himself and make himself useful. Men don’t like to share responsibilities with the state.

My most popular posts on that issue are here:

Something to think about.

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Videos

Dr. Matt Flanagan explains what moral relativism is and why it fails

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Check out this 5-part video of Matt Flanagan’s recent lecture at the Thinking Matters conference in New Zealand.

If you don’t understand what moral relativism is, this is a thorough treatment that covers all the bases.

News

Canadian court rules that Christians MUST perform same-sex marriages

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Story from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Nichols, who served as a marriage commissioner from 1983 after retiring from a 25-year career in the police force, was approached by the complainant, only identified as M.J., in April 2005 to conduct the ceremony.  Nichols informed M.J. that he was available, but when he realized that M.J.’s partner, B.R., was a man, he told them that he could not “marry” them based on his religious beliefs.

[…]Nichols had himself complained to the human rights tribunal in February 2005 after he had been informed in November 2004 by the Saskatchewan Department of Justice that commissioners would be required to conduct same-sex ceremonies after the law changed to allow them.  That case was later dismissed, in March 2006.

He was fined $2,500 by the tribunal in June 2008, which decided that as an official of the government, Nichols was not entitled to have his religious beliefs accommodated.

Nichols appealed that decision to the Court of Queen’s Bench, contending that his right to religious freedom should have been protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But Justice Janet McMurtry upheld the tribunal’s decision.

Nichols’ religious views are not relevant in how he conducts his job, according to the judge in her 36-page decision.  “In that capacity [as marriage commissioner], his personal religious beliefs do not matter,” she wrote.

So much for the right to religious liberty. What this decision says is that government’s values supercede the values of individual citizens – even if it violates the fundamental right to religious liberty.