Rejoinder Comments on Morality

Well, after waiting several days, I finally figured out what was going on with the discussion that had started within the article ‘Atheism and Morality‘. It seems that Akismet, that wonderful utility that captures and flags spam, had been a little overzealous in capturing comments from other people, as well. Which, I guess, would explain why they myriad comments I’ve left on other blogs around WordPress have not appeared within my Comments menu item. I hope that this problem finally has been fixed.

For the purposes of this article, I will be quoting from several layers deep from the discussion, akin to what you normally find in a spirited listserv or Usenet discussion. While this format is not the most ideal for blogs, I think that it is pertinent that all see exactly what is taking place in regards to the break down of rational discussion and apologetics. June, an avowed fundamentalist, seems to be making the same errors over and over again. I think I detect a hint of frustration in the posts that have been left by June. While this whole discussion began with myself making a comment on one of her articles, things have spiraled out of control ever since. With the beginning debate on Biblical Slavery, I have restricted myself to just debating the virtues of atheism, Biblical Slavery, and morality. Morality, by necessity, needs to be discussed when contemplating the slave trade, especially when the crux of the debate hinges on the fact that the Bible never condemns the practice, but sets up rules and regulations in order to live with it. This, of course, has been my premise of immorality within the Bible, something that June even tacitly admitted that the Bible never condemns the practice. However, because of the discussion on morality, which tangentially also brushed up on the issue of atheism, June then began to assert that atheists, in a nutshell, are amoral. Yes, I know, this was never said outright, but I plan on proving this through expository analysis of the posts that have been left on this blog.

To begin with, starting with the post ‘Atheism and Morality‘, I wanted to clear up a few myths. Go ahead, re-read the article to freshen your minds on what was, and was not, stated. Now, here is June’s first posting on the matter:

You put forth these arguments; and, sure, they sound great on the surface; but they themselves are nothing but straw men.

Why didn’t I quote more? Because of one thing- June’s use of the term “straw men”. I have, over and over again, pointed out logical fallacies that are embedded within certain theistic arguments. Sometimes, as Nick can testify to, I’ve gone overboard and been rather patronizing and condescending, upon which, when pointed out, I’ve immediately apologized. However, the one thing that I cannot stand is a blatant logical fallacy that is embedded in an argument. (Trust me, making a rational, logical thesis is extremely hard work, as it forces you to use critical thinking skills and not to resort to assumptions.) I have pointed out the New True Scotsman Fallacy, the Straw Man Fallacy, the Bifurcation Error fallacy, Begging the Question, Tautology, and so on and so forth. I’ve even provided links to these fallacies to the pertinent Wikipedia articles that give a brief overview of what they look like. The reason why I stopped quoting there is because it appears that June still does not know what a Straw Man fallacy is. Be that as it may, here is a quote from Wikipedia:

A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponents position.

That’s it. In the article, I made no straw man arguments that I can detect. I wasn’t even debating about the Christian theology. Instead, I was clearing up myths and misunderstandings that a lot of fundamentalists have about atheists and atheism. It seems that this escaped June.

To continue with June’s comments from the article:

1. The Catholic Church (the original version, at least) is not Christianity. Why is that? Well, it’s because they devalue Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Why did June state this? I believe that it was in reference to this quote from the article:

The most successful communist regime in the world today, and by far the oldest, is the Catholic Church. Most Christians are uncomfortable with that fact, because they have been conditioned to only think of Communism in terms of a caricature of atheism.

Now, where in the article was I tacitly discussing the Catholic Church? Yes, that’s right, dear readers, it was only discussed in the context of communism. Specifically, it was discussed in the context of communism not being an atheist only framework for government, as there are many, many theistic implementations of that that can be wrought in the world, and organizations that are both theistic and communistic. However, two fallacies were deployed here: the No True Sotsman Fallacy, and a Red Herring. The discussion was not about the Catholic Church being Christian, but that of communism having many different flavors; hence the Red Herring fallacy. The No True Sotsman fallacy by her denial that Catholics are Christians. Which is the reason why I replied with:

Irrelevant, not to mention off-topic and arbitrary.

Junes response to this was:

I’m sorry; but you are completely ignoring what I have said by writing it off as nonsense; but that only shows me how unwilling you are to see the truth because I made great points in there.

Maybe, just maybe, after she reads this post, she will realize why those points were considered irrelevant. I’m hoping she goes to the links cited, and really reads and tries to understand the fallacies so as not to repeat them again. In the context of discussing Morality, Slavery, and the Doctrine of Inerrancy, yes, I will ignore those points, as they have nothing to do with the discussion at hand. If they do, then please reword the argument so that a simpleton like me, someone who appreciates rationality in a post with an adherence to logic, can follow it.

Now, going to her most recent comment, skipping the irrelevant parts of Catholicism for reasons already stated, we have:

That was the point of those examples of injustices against fundamentalists. If you had read it, you would know that I asked you what I can tell these atheists to show them how they are going against the principles of atheism to prove definitively that what they are doing is wrong. I can point to the Bible. What can you do? Granted, these articles don’t explicitly say that the people who arrested them are atheists. But that’s a little bit difficult to specify. These arrests, though, are a result of assaults on Christians in the political realm which are a result of free thought on the part of liberals.

To begin with, I would say that the most important principle for an atheist would be that of Reason. The majority, if not all, of the atheists in the world came to their conclusions regarding the concept and existence of God through lengthy deliberations, reasoning, and weighing of the evidence. Without the capacity to reason, and more specifically, to employ critical thinking skills in the realm of religion, most of the people that you know would still be following the antecedents and rituals of their forebears. The concept or morality is a concept that stems from reason. For instance, if you had clicked on the links and actually read the articles on Aristotle and Plato, not to mention the essay pertaining to materialist ethics, you would have known this.

Another point to make in reference to this paragraph is the fact that you posit no moral structure, no reasoned ethic, no logical argument for what morality is. The purpose of the debate was if slavery was moral or not, and if the Bible had explicitly banned it. As you have not answered that question, I can only surmise that it is because you have not thought out a well reasoned structure for the basis of morality in your own life. You keep saying that you can point to the Bible for morality, but I can quote verse after verse where the most immoral acts are condoned by the God of the Bible, and call them immoral. Why? Because of reason. Because I, as a rational creature, with the capacity to reason, can come to conclusions based on empirical evidence and in keeping with the doctrine of reasonableness, can make moral judgements. However, since you point out your vitriol time and time again about moral relativism, but without defining exactly what absolute morality is, I believe that you yourself do not know. Please post on this. Here is an essay on Absolute Morality from the atheistic perspective.

And just for fun, because you are being so vague, is human sacrifice moral? Reason and rationality say that it is immoral, but it seems that it was pleasing unto the God of the Old Testament.

After this, in June’s most recent comment, we get to the fact of numerous citations being quoted purportedly about “atheists” who are oppressing fundamentalist Christians. However, all of the quotes in the comment were from Fundamentalist organizations that had no links to the original Reuters or AP wire articles. That may be just as well, as it seems that June still hasn’t read the original article where I posted:

We can see that atheism does not equate to immorality. Neither does theism. Morality is defined, regulated, and ruled by other ideas and concepts.

Since June seems to be confused about the issue, I even posted again:

In the links provided within the article there were clear examples and logical arguments showing the dichotomy between God and morality. One does not necessarily follow from the other, another point that you ignored. The examples provided showed there is no correlation between theism and morality, just as there is no correlation between atheism and morality.

So, let me clarify again: What are your standards of morality, how do you come to them, and are they logical? Do they contradict each other? Are there logical fallacies in play? Instead of addressing this issue, you posted link after link of articles that only proved my point. (I’m just as outraged as you in some of those articles, as I firmly believe in Patrick Henry’s statement,”I may not believe what you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”) Perhaps if you address the situation at hand? Of course, rather than addressing the issue, you wrote:

Quite frankly, you wouldn’t be able to prove to a Communist that what he is doing is wrong though. How would you tell the following Communists that this action is wrong?

Again, we can ascertain that Communism is wrong through reason. The a priori maxim of ‘Each man has a right to his own life’, with all of the corollaries, show that communism is wrong. This is not the point, though, as communism being equated to atheism was a myth that was dispelled in the article. On this point June then goes in further:

It’s wrong because you say so? It’s wrong because someone else says so? It’s wrong because they wouldn’t like it?
First of all, who are you to tell them what to do? How do you truly know what right and wrong are? Second, so what if they wouldn’t like it if it was them? There’s nothing really wrong with doing things to people that they themselves wouldn’t want done to them.

This is yet another Straw Man argument. June has over and over again equated atheists as being amoral; that they have no capacity to know what right and wrong are, and that atheists firmly believe in all instances that the ends will justify the means for the purposes of furthering their own egoism. June seems to not have grasped the rationality behind morality, and seems to be supporting the notion that the only way to tell right from wrong is adherence to the Bible. If this is the case, then how do we know if the Bible is right or wrong? Given June’s supposition, one can infer that atheists, and indeed others that are not Christian, do not know what right and wrong are, and cannot know this, but must blindly follow the dictates from Scripture in order to be assured that what their actions will follow a righteous path. This logic leaves June in a bind in defending slavery as wrong, though, as all people, Christian, Atheist, Agnostic, Pagan, and so on, believe that slavery is a vile, immoral institution.

The more pertinent point, though, is that we are again dealing with a level of recursion that needs to be addressed. Is God good because He says He is good? If that is the case, then we are back to the method of ‘Might Makes Right’. However, if God commanded people to start slaughtering those others that did not believe upon Him, either through ignorance, or because they are of a different religious stripe, then would God still be good? Of course, through the process of reason, a rational person would say ‘No!’. Then, we can see that God is not the progenitor of Good, but Good and Evil are transcendent moral facts that are themselves separate from God. If anyone purporting to be God, as defined in this instance as having the property of Omnibenevolence, but does or commands immoral acts, then we can safely assume that this would be a false god. June still hasn’t written a thesis about his/her conception of morality and how to define it. I’ve given several links already on ethics and morality, all mutually supportive of each other as each is based within the methods of reason, and all of them explaining, within a larger epistemological framework the concepts of Good and Evil.

I suspect that June has not posted such reasonings because of a lack of understanding of Epistemology, and the larger aspects of Ethical reasoning in regards to that which is true and false.

Wrong doesn’t exist in the atheist world. If it’s wrong for the individual, it’s wrong. Period.

In discussions such as these, I’m always amused be people who make an unproven assertion, but then try to distract from it by ending the statement with ‘Period’. There is no supporting evidence, no supporting reasoning; we are to accept June’s statement blindly. June, you need to prove that atheism is equated to amorality. I’ve done my fair share of giving you some links to begin researching this topic, but it seems you want to keep on propagating a myth. (Which is a polite way to put it, as I believe that it is a bald face lie, although not an intentional one.)

On the Bible and Morality:

You demand that I prove that the Bible is the authority; but if you read what I wrote, I clearly state that it’s wrong for me.

Okay, here I’m a confused. Do you mean that Biblical morality is wrong for you? Do you mean the Bible as a whole is wrong for you? I couldn’t find the antecedent this statement was in reference to, so I’m kind of out of the loop on this point.

I was refuting your assumption that I follow these moral codes because I will go to Hell otherwise. Here it is again:

Quote Myself:
I follow the morals of the Bible because it has proven itself to be the Word of God to me. And God’s morals are good. I follow them because they make the world a better place, not because they save me from a lake of fire because they do not.

June, you have skirted the issue over and over again: How can you tell if the morals are good or not? If they are defined to be good arbitrarily by a transcendent being, then how would you know that human sacrifice is bad? If the Bible condoned human sacrifice (theoretically, and yes I’m aware of the hermeneutics that have been employed to excuse the previous example cited of human sacrifice in scripture, but I find them to be weak and irrational), then a person would be put in the unfortunate position of having to defend human sacrifice as Good, because of the assertion that all Good and Evil is defined de facto by God. However, here, in this sentence, you have shown that you do know what right and wrong are, and that you have some method of expounding upon it. Please elucidate this for the rest of us.

But this is supposed to be an analysis of atheistic beliefs, not Christian. You charge me with skirting the issue when it is you who is doing so.

I’ve provided link after link for the basis of morality, all without resorting to positing the unknown in order to know what is moral. I’ve requested that June does likewise. To date, the only thing that has been accomplished has been the changing of the subject again and again, in an adversarial manner, to keep from showing where June’s moral center is grounded. Let me state again: Can June post a logical, rational thesis on morality? Especially in the context of the original debate, which was the Scriptural justification of slavery? (And the side issues pertaining to the Doctrine of Inerrancy.)

When it comes to atheism, June has not done a very good job. June has posted myth after myth, all refuted, on how fundamentalist view atheism. Like I stated in the original article:

No argument should be based in ignorance, or a willful distortion of other’s worldview that you yourself may not hold. Such is the death of wisdom; true wisdom comes in the form of knowing how little you know, and striving to add to your knowledge with the tools that you have available.

To continue with June’s comments:

Unless I find that you are misconstruing Christianity, which was the point of those quotes.

This I find to be funny, as the original article was posted to refute June’s distortions of atheism. The only point that was made in regards to Christianity was in refuting that a political ideology logically followed being an atheist. This has been proved false, but then June thinks I was misconstruing Christianity. The points that were raised in this respect have been refuted over and over again. The intent of the article was not a description of Christianity, but a description of Atheism, and what one should expect from it. Again, this seems to be beyond June’s ken.

Please read my quotes and the text right above them. I am asking you for your opinion on them. Since it seems like you agree with them, I will just go ahead and tell you where I got them from.

Here, we see that June is still engaged with the Red Herring Fallacy. Let me state this: it matters not how many links you post, as for each link that you post in support of fundamentalists being oppressed, I can post another link to an atheist being oppressed. It matters not as both of them lend credence to what has already been stated: Theism or Atheism is not correlated to morality! Reason is. However, it seems dodging the arguments seem to be the order of the day in this thread.

You can post links to books claiming that the Nazi leadership was Christian just because they were trying to win over a Catholic Germany; but private personal comments among friends and family state the contrary. I don’t know whether or not Hitler was atheist. He did use symbols of Hinduism and Buddhism for his flag; but one thing is clear. He wasn’t Christian.

Again, we are back to the ‘No True Sotsman’ fallacy. As far as his being Christian or not, I do not know. Neither, I believe, will it ever be proved one way or another as far as what his personal religious beliefs were. While the comment that was posted is very interesting, I cannot ascertain what the context was. However, it is an undeniable fact that the leadership of Fascist Germany was Christian. This, again, proves that you are moving from point to point in a Red Herring Fallacy. Please post your thesis on morality, specifically on how it applies to Biblical justifications for slavery.

On the point of evolution, Herbert Spencer was trained as a minister, and was a prominent philosopher of the 19th century in England. However, his misapplication of Darwin’s theory of evolution to the social sciences is egregious, as has been discuss here. It seems that Fundamentalists want to confuse the issue between Darwin’s theory of Evolution, and Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism, as it benefits them to keep the waters muddied to prevent others from seeing with the clear eyes of rationality. Be that as it may, it has little to do with morality in the context of the Doctrine of Inerrancy, and the Biblical justifications for slavery. Again, the fallacy of the Red Herring is present here.

One thing that I want to touch on before I end this article:

What’s your definition of immoral?
You can’t give me one. If you did, you would be advocating the oppression of free thought.

Where on earth did June get this idea? This is patently false, deceptive, and not to mention another unproven assertion, as there is no definition of free though, and an irrational supposition that freedom to think would be oppressive to others. Here is a good starting definition of what exactly FreeThought is:

Freethought: The right to entertain any opinions that commends themselves to the judgement of earnest and honest seekers of truth, without his being made a victim of social ostracism in this world, or without his being threatened with punishment in some other.

This does not mean that any opinion goes. Only those premises which are supported by evidence and reason should be entertained by the FreeThinker. This not only extands to atheists, but to theists as well. How one can conclude that FreeThinking means anything goes is quite beyond my grasp. (ie, illogical, irrational, and another myth that Fundamentalists like to tout when debating the concepts of Atheism.)