Originally posted by gaychessplayer
All moral claims made by atheists are totally subjective. There are no "good" or "bad" rules in any ultimate sense. They simply exist. The only reason in a Godless world to respect others is so that others will respect me. Ultimately, though, in a Godless universe it's just a matter of what I can get away with. In a Godless universe, there is no moral difference between Hitler and Mother Theresa.
Let’s suppose for the moment that you are wrong: it turns out that, like it or not, there is no God.
If you were to discover that, are you saying that
you see no moral difference between the acts of a Hitler and those of a Mother Theresa? Or, that you have no
sense of the matter, absent a God who declares one set of actions to be moral and the other not?
Probably any human behavior is subject to statistical distribution, whatever its width or shape. People who obtain their happiness from inflicting capricious pain and suffering on others—e.g., rape. torture, your “killing of innocents”—are more generally judged to be insane, rather than simply immoral. It’s quite possible that eons of evolution as social animals has “wired” some moral sensibilities into the human consciousness—again, that can likely be seen in a statistical distribution across cultures and religions. That’s only one hypothesis, of course.
In any event, a common moral feature seems to be that one needs a
justifying reason for harming another. People and cultures may disagree about what constitutes a sufficient justifying reason, and under what conditions, but it seems to be such a common feature that people who deny such a need are likely to be judged, not just morally, but mentally deficient. And this seems to hold regardless of religion, which religion or no religion. The justifying reasons themselves also do not seem to be at such variance across cultures and religions (though of course there is some).
Discussions of whether such a phenomenon points to the evolution of our consciousness, simple cultural conditioning for the good of the group, or the existence of some divine agent who made it so, or—whatever—the fact remains that moral sensibility, whatever the theory behind it, seems broadly enough distributed across the human race as to belie any notion of “godlessness” leading to moral nihilism.
Maybe I’m a bit too sanguine about the matter: my personal “happiness complex” does not include any desire to inflict harm on others just for the “happiness” of it, so not doing so does not represent any sacrifice. And again, for those (statistically few) whose happiness complex includes such a desire, I suspect they are not merely in thrall to a mistaken moral theory, but insane.
If your happiness complex includes such things, and you are simply sacrificing your happiness in this existence for the sake of eternal life, then I hope you continue to do so. I doubt that that is the case, since I have yet to encounter anyone who claimed that it was. The claim is generally that there are other people for whom this is the case, and that they would be unleashed, so to speak, if they stopped believing in God—but I suspect that an insane mind can find its way around that...
Afraid to Die?
19 Sep '07 20:30
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