- 'Without it,' he says, 'you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'
Amish, that's not really answering the original question. The above quote asserts that to do evil, one needs religion - and then what follows is the common belief that religion is responsible for most of the wars, etc. etc. What is true, is that Atheists were responsible for the deaths of more people in the last century than all previous centuries - 120 -130 million by communists and 12-15 million by Nazis. By conservative numbers, that’s almost 8-10% of the world’s population at the respective times. The next logical argument is that that evil people don't have to be religious, but what is good and evil? You have nothing to quantify it by!!! Good or evil has to be based on a moral law that supercedes (not the right word, but lacking coffee) a society - it must be in of itself with or without a society, present outside of the society on its own, and yet knowable to that society. Think moral law being akin to a physical law. If not then you end up with moral relativism – which is the natural result of the secular humanistic dialectic construct. Let’s not judge each other, correct? With atheism you are freed from the burden of absolutes and the inherent judgment of absolute right and wrong. One can make up a morality to suit their needs and time in history. The Nazis obeyed the laws of the dialectical construct and obeyed evolution. Why weren’t they correct?!? Lebensraum is morally right if you decide that land is a necessity, they were surviving and growing as a culture and they were strongest. Who are we to judge… What is wrong is the innate knowledge that you don’t f**king kill 10 million of your neighbors!!! But if you look at their moral construct, they followed it to a logical end.
- "Dawkins agrees. It is more moral, he says, to do good for its own sake than out of fear."
This statement sounds great, until you apply logic. You can’t do good for its own sake unless you believe that good is a constant truth. What is good and what is evil unless you can judge them with a scientific type method. To do that, you must have a constant. You must have a universal truth to base what is good. Good is there whether you want to do anything about it. Evil is not in and of itself, it is a rebellion of what is Good, not its own force. If its not, then evil is its own force. If evil were its own force, opposite and there outside of good, then why is evil bad. If they both exist for their own sake, which one would be correct? The fear that Dawkins talks about is the fear of an absolute, a constant that judges right and wrong with no impartiality or empathy as to the shades of grey. If there is no constant, immutable truth, then there is no fear… but there is also no good for good’s sake. It is only Yin and Yang at that point. And you can’t tell one from the other, they are both equally there.
- "Morality, he says, is older than religion, and kindness and generosity are innate in human beings, as they are in other social animals."
PCL covered that one pretty well, as does the question of origins.
- "The irony is that science recognises the majesty and complexity of the universe while religions lead to easy, closed answers."
Easy and closed answers? Like the big bang? There was a basketball full of all the material in the universe (we don’t know how it got there) it exploded (we don’t know why) and formed order (even though that would contradict the second law of thermodynamics). Then, over time (Lots and lots, and still more) some of this material somehow (don’t ask us how, or why), by chance (since there was no design) came together to form an amino acid (but every time you induce this in a lab the amino acid created is toxic to any known cell) and then all the amino acids (there’s more than one of the correct ones created by all of this time and chance right next to another other one?) formed the first simple cell (with all of those pesky lines of organized code of RNA/DNA with enough information to fill thousands of books and a processing power plant to convert material to energy and oh yeah, it has to have a baby) and by chance (no design at all in that first cell though) and time (aren’t we running out of it yet?) we’re here with a moral construct and airplanes to fly!
Obviously, I don’t agree with Dawkins. Science for its own sake, leaves us more void of answers and with more ridiculous assertions than a good, old timey religion. My assertion is that majesty invokes a sense of awe. I have a painiting in my den that my brother in law painted, and I look at it and think 'damn Scott, that's a hell of a job' - I look out the window at work and see the rugged outline of Greenland and say, wow Lord, nice work. Dawkins and I would both marvel, i'm sure - I marvel at the handiwork of the Creator, not the creation.
The point is Amish, I’m sure we could meet and be good friends and have a pint and laugh about all of this, and I’d like to. My goal is not to make someone who disagrees with me look inferior, because they have a lot invested in their construct of how to go about life – so don’t so easily dismiss us God Loving rubes to necessary idiots.
