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From:
http://www.atheistlloyd.com/SecMorality/MoralRelativity.html
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Moral Relativity?
Hah!
Who Should Not be Pointing Fingers!
by Lloyd Harrison Whitling
SML163
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The Internet, the newspapers, the self-righteous
slime-slinging radio shows abound with it: Moral relativity is the
accusation of the day. It may, in fact, be the accusation of the
generation for generations to come. Like most slung slime, it is a lie of
which the accusers stand more guilty than all the world they rant against.
In a letter
to the editor from a remote newspaper named Journal Sentinel
[Original
letter:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/feb06/389725.asp
Today's LtE:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=401768 ] entitled
"ATHEISM", the writer begins his rant with, "What's
lacking is clear moral standard", and continues:
"The Feb. 6 letters regarding Dale Reich's column
offered little to refute his premise. Some hurled invective. Some
countered with sanctimony. Some camouflaged specious rebuttals with olive
branches. Only one displayed magnanimity. None presented a basis for
atheistic morality, which, despite some arguments I wouldn't have made, I
believe was the underlying problem exposed by the column. Reich might
otherwise have written, 'Without God, all is permissible.'"
Actually,
with the god named God, all is permissible. All, and much more
that atheists, by themselves, could not think up.
Without
reading all the letters to which he refers, I would acknowledge that his
criticism of atheist respondents is most likely accurate, given my own
experiences. We do not have a unified system of morality set up by
manipulative priests who steal our individuality with guilt, threats of
permanent pain, and shame forever, to goad us into doing what healthy
humans would never consider. We, atheists, arrive at right and wrong by
walking our own paths through life. We do not agree about how to talk
about it, but we do share a common recognition of right and wrong by the
time we have reached maturity. It is one of the few things we have no
arguments about.
We do argue
about morality. Many of us share a notion that we are amoral; some claim
to be immoral or unmoral; some say it is a strawman notion that
religionists have devised to beat other people over the heads with, and
that nothing about it has anything at all to do with reality. I think they
are all wrong, and that atheists share the high road on this matter.
The writer
continues: "Most of the letters
insisted that, despite their rejection of God, atheists are nice people
who believe in nice things. Nevertheless, by what standard do atheists
even judge what is nice or bad, good or evil? Reich implied that there is
none, so he questions why atheists subscribe to those antiquated
Judeo-Christian notions. For those without a basis for morality, all
morality must be relative. All is permissible."
This sheds light on the real problem here, one of
communication. We do not share a language. We barely share a language
among atheists. The religious do not speak a secular language, and so do
not share our definitions. Most atheists know only the religious language,
and so do not have a secular definition for what they see to be an attempt
by the religious to bedevil and demonize them.
"For theists, morality isn't relative,"
the writer goes on, and then claims, "There's
a standard by which to judge such things." He never proposes the
standard, never explains why it cannot be observed among the religious,
but only claims it into existence by the force of his words. He never
mentions who, in words from the New Testament, it is that is professed to
be the only one with the authority to mete out judgment, and takes upon
himself the right to do the work supposed to be left for the Christian
God.
The rest his
letter trails off into highmindedness about the true Christians being
those who will forgive atheists for the errors of our ways, thus also
taking the glory of that out from their God's hands and making it their
own to perform. I doubt that, if they truly do have a God and are not
worshipping idols whose images have been etched into their own minds, that
this God thing would very much approve of such actions. |
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Truth be told, to theists morality does not mean the same
as for secularists. The two sets of definitions cancel each other out,
making their view of each others' tenets of operation into something
nonexistent. The theological view of morality is all about service to a
particular version of a god inherent to their various and sundry creeds.
Most of which varies from that, as dredged up from the biblical Old
Testament, describes how to barter jackasses and slaves, take care of the
religious artifacts, and how and when to punish the women. Not much of it
is about personal behavior, which is what secular people see morality as
being all about, but it seems to be about raping and pillaging, and then
seeking forgiveness and going on to profess the gloriousness of lives
belonging to one of the several Old Testament gods.
Hallelujah! All the average Christian needs to worry about is how to get
forgiven after each sin before something comes along and kills him, in
which case his unforgiven selfness is going to burn forever in hell. In
the New Testament, when queried about the status of the law, Jesus is
quoted as saying the law remains in effect, but boils it down to
(paraphrased) love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
That leaves a lot open to the imagination: If you are a masochist, go beat
your neighbor up and expect him to enjoy it. If you love to masturbate, go
play with your neighbor. If you love satisfying your fleshly lusts, go
find a neighbor and praise the Lord a whole bunch of times while you work
things out together. Does that sound like "
a standard by which to judge
such things"? Is that why so many Christians are so grossly overweight
when compared to members of other religions? Or, were you thinking only
about sex? Shame on you!
The false claim of moral relativity, advanced with no real explanation of
its meaning, is without merit when it comes from people whose very creeds
expound on the irrelevance of this life with their ideals. I would suppose
the dictionary's definitions for relativity might apply to morality. From
American Heritage:
rel·a·tiv·i·ty
(r΅l"
-tΉv"Ή-tΆ)
n. 1.
The quality or state of being relative. 2.
Philosophy. Existence dependent solely on relation to a thinking mind.
3. A state of dependence in which the existence or significance
of one entity is solely dependent on that of another.
It appears that number three is the one chosen as a basis for the
religious angst, that supports the view that, "without God, all is
permissible." That meshes with other religious claims, such as, "If I were
an atheist, nothing would stop me from committing murder." Such a
statement makes one wonder what kind of other vile evils lurk in the
hearts of those who would claim that. When you begin to notice the high
percentage of theists who make their hypocrisy obvious, in numbers that
far exceed those of true believers, about whom (they being atheists
without the knowledge and experience of it) such statements most apply, it
then gets easy to see why the world is full of hatred and war.
Notice the definition refers to "entity". Do the religious perceive of
morality as an "entity" right along with their view of a God as such? If
their concerns are with qualities and states, such as in definition number
one, they have a problem when they propose their claims about such without
any adequate descriptions (or none at all). It would seem that those who
demand the right to rape and pillage (which are, after all, only temporal
things) in between forgivenesses would want those they criticize and
demonize to understand exactly what they're talking about. I would like to
know exactly what they are talking about. Do they have a real case against
us, even based solely on their scriptures? Can they make a point-by-point
case about our absence of moral qualms backed up by scriptures wholly in
context?
They cannot, and here is why: Their actual moral practices come from the
exact same source from which we secular atheists have gained our own.
President Lincoln alluded to that source when he voiced this quote
attributed to him: "When I do bad, I feel bad. When I do good, I feel
good. That is my religion." That is Practical Hedonism, beautifully and
concisely expressed as Lincoln would. Morality for Christians, as well as
everybody else, arises from nothing other than the avoidance of pain and
the threat of pain. There is nothing relative about that, except for the
sake of vague philosophizing. Whether psychological or physical,
punishment is the infliction of pain, and reward is the pleasurable
withdrawal from it.
Pain either hurts or it doesn't. Nothing about pain is relative, whether
it is the religious threat of burning alive in Hell or the contemplation
of one's own death at the hands of violence. Statistically, secular
atheists seem to do a better job of imagining themselves wearing others'
shoes. We know the value of empathy and fair trade. More aware of nature
and consequences than they are, we are safer to deal with than any members
of the Arabic religions because we avoid inflicting pain by forecasting
how our actions might affect other people. If we are more honest and
upright than those who demonize us, what right have they to judge us?
We point our fingers back:
From John P. of AFS:
"The letter that
concerns you fails to define 'what god' or 'whose god'.
"Without that definition the theists are floating in a
sea of relativism without a personal way to determine for themselves what
is or is not theist idiocy."
Next (Do you have a comment? Let others read it
here):
Messages with attachments will be
rejected unopened.
Be certain your comments or suggestions
meet the
Principles
of Atheology. Angry religious rants will be dealt with
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Copyright ©2005
by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.
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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure
is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of
how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render
the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will
be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in
moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways
to demonstrate that."
L. H. Whitling in the eBook,
Secular Morality |
This page last edited on
01/21/2008
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