The View From 1776

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A liberal critic emailed me the following rebuttal to my posting titled “Moral Models from Mainstream Media,” which appeared on the Intellectual Conservative website and on The View From 1776.

CrankyLiberal wrote:

So people without religion can be occasionally OK, decent enough fellas, but not as a whole. That’s bigoted thinking like when your grandparents used to talk about all Colored’s aren’t bad, they used to have one as a friend. Mr. Brewton makes an unprovable and logically indefensible argument simply because most non religious people ARE ethical, do have morals, and do respect their fellow man. He cannot claim why they do it, nor can he claim why they don’t. He has no knowledge of motive or their philosophy.
It is also asinine to say that they are moral “free riders” because that asserts that without Judeo-Christian “morals” there would be no morality. First, there is nothing unique about Judeo-Christian morality. Sorry, there isn’t. Look back at the history of belief systems and they all tend to agree on basic points like don’t kill, don’t steal because those things make sense. Second, relative to the history of civilization Judeo-Christian philosophy is a young pup in the realm of belief systems. All those civilizations before Mr. Brewton’s “moral law book” was written had a sense of ethics and morals. To state otherwise shows an incredibly amount of ignorance and arrogance.
Of course, Mr. Brewton seems to be fixated on sex, because we all know to too many on the Religious Right, sex is about the worst thing that can ever happen in this world. Fornication is worse than hunger, disease, poverty, crime, environmental rape or unnecessary wars. The human condition seems to be less important than the condition of your virginity.
In the end, I find this argument be self serving and delusional. People who believe in God (or gods) are no more or less likely to be better people than those who do not. They are just as likely to get divorced, cheat on their wives, bugger little boys, cheat on their taxes, talk bad about their mamma or any other “hedonistic” or “immoral” act Mr. Brewer can think of. If religion is supposed to keep these people in check, it’s doing a piss-poor job. I have to wonder who the moral “free riders” really are.

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My reply:

Usually I try to be polite, but let me suggest that atheistic, secular liberals literally are not reading what I wrote, or perhaps that their biases somehow cause them to see words, but prevent their understanding them.

Nowhere, at any time, have I ever said that atheists can’t be moral in their behavior.  My point never has been that liberals and atheists are necessarily immoral.  Plenty of them behave morally, but only when they adopt the morality bequeathed to them by religion.

What I have repeatedly stated is that whatever atheists’ moral behavior standards may be, those standards came originally from religion.  That is simply an historical fact.  I challenge atheists to find a single moral standard, from anywhere, any culture, any time that did not arise as part of that society’s metaphysical religion.

The only “modern,” scientific, made-up from scratch “morality” is so-called social justice that led atheistic liberals to rationalize Stalin’s slaughtering tens of millions of people in the faith that it was all for the benefit of an abstraction called “humanity” at some future date, when government supposedly would wither away. 

In an atheistic, secular world, the only factors are material forces, and by definition, therefore, metaphysically-based morality simply cannot exist.  Thus, if the leader decrees that creating the New Soviet Man requires slaughtering a few million land-owning farmers, so be it.  There are no rules of secular “morality” to stop it. 

John Dewey’s atheistic and secular philosophy of pragmatism made this explicit.  Dewey lectured at Columbia University in the early part of the 20th century that there can be no such things as moral standards, because Darwin had “proved” that everything is continually evolving.  Thus, the only standards of conduct must be whatever gets for you what you want.

In the real world, atheistic, liberal social justice and Dewey’s pragmatism sometimes necessitate mass slaughter, because the end-point of social justice is redistribution of income and property to create an egalitarian society.  In most cases, people resist and must be plowed under.

A good society, as defined by atheistic liberals has nothing whatever to do with morality as most people understand that word.  A good society is measured only in material terms, by the amounts of physical goods and services dispensed by the political state, the welfare-state.  The rules for redistribution of property have nothing whatever to do with morality.  Those rules are simply the mathematics of distribution among faceless social classes. 

Morality applies to individuals dealing with other individuals.  Atheistic liberalism deals with “the masses.”

Atheists usually attempt to rebut this by calling it lies and by ad hominem attacks featuring scatological language.  Again, I challenge you atheists to read (if you have the ability) what your progenitors actually wrote in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  If you find it to be moral, than you simply do not comprehend the meaning of the word moral.

The point is that atheism, standing alone without standards borrowed from religion, is simply nihilism, the belief that there are no standards other than what the atheist finds beneficial to himself, in effect that there are no rules at all.

That’s akin to John Dewey’s progressive education via Rousseau, the belief that children will learn by themselves, via “experiences,” all that they need to know.  Anyone for letting every student intuit calculus on his own, from “experiences”?  

In fact, the world depends upon the vast accumulation of morality and knowledge carried forward in religion and tradition.  An atheistic, secular, liberal world unable to borrow moral standards from religion would be nothing more than a jungle, Thomas Hobbes’s war of all-against-all in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. 

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