In chapter seven of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins attacks the book from which some Christians claim to get their moral code from, I am speaking of course about the Old Testament. However, Dawkins makes it clear that he is not criticizing the moral or conduct of Christians per say, rather, he argues that Christians, like other mortals in fact do not derive their morals from the bible…
"We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation."
That people "pick and choose" among the moral guidelines in the bible becomes extremely obvious when you take into account what is actually advocated in the Old Testament. I believe that not even fundamentalist a Christians would send his or her daughter into the hands of rapists and murders (see Judges 19:23-4). I also wonder how many fundamentalist Christians actually think that God is doing the right thing when he commands the stoning of a poor man who worked on the Sabbath!? And then again there are people who believe strongly in their own interpretation of the bible, and based on that interpretation they commit horrible crimes… Richard Dawkins writes:
"As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, 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.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Criticizing the Old Testament is like shooting a dead elephant, not very difficult. To me it is quite incomprehensible how people today can believe literally everything that is written in the Old Testament. It is even more difficult for me to understand why someone would want to get their morals from this book. Luckily Yahweh's son(?) Jesus came along. I hope that those who believe that Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist atheist who hits out at anything and everything associated with religion, will read the following quote carefully…
Well, there's no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn't) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His 'turn the other cheek' anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years. It was not for nothing that I wrote an article called 'Atheists for Jesus' (and was later delighted to be presented with a T-shirt bearing the legend).
I also see Jesus as a role model in more than one respect and I think his philosophy is good, albeit not perfect. I admire Jesus in the same way that I admire other philosophers such Bentham, Mill, Rawls and Kant. All these men have influenced the way I think about good and bad, but I don't think any of these men have THE ethical philosophy. Similarly, Jesus as he is described in the New Testament has many good ideas and thoughts, but he is not always an example to follow. Dawkins writes.
Jesus' family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to follow him. 'If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
Speaking about Jesus, I have also always asked myself why? Why did God have to incarnate himself, ridicule his incarnation, and then finally have him crucified just in order to forgive us? Why couldn't God, who is after all omnipotent and omniscient, just forgive our sins without going through all the trouble? I don't think I have ever gotten a straight answer to that question…
A couple a weeks ago I was asked the question which always pops up in discussions such as this one: What about Stalin and Hitler, they were atheists and they were evil!? Doesn't that mean that atheism makes people evil? No it doesn't. In my mind it is not important what a particular person or dictator believes. What matters to me is the behavior and actions of the person in question. Quite often a person's beliefs influence the behavior of the believer and then the beliefs becomes relevant. Religion I believe, in general, has a bad influence on people's behavior, in particular when we are talking about world leaders since they become more rigid and difficult to negotiate with. Atheism, I would argue, has no such effect on behavior. Hitler probably was religious (read the book if you want further justification of this point), but Joseph Stalin was certainly an atheist. Did atheism make Stalin commit his crimes, I believe not. Did his Islamic conviction make Osama Bin Laden commit his crimes, yes they probably did…
What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.
Z, you don't have to see a person to feel empathy or sympathy. Also, the point Dawkins and many other atheists make is that this way of dealing with morals is not limited to atheists - all humans get their morals from the same source. You would still be a moral person even if you didn't believe in Jesus, because you would still have such feelings as empathy, sympathy, compassion. You would also still be afraid being ostracised if you broke the social rules of the society you live in. Without Jesus, you still have the need to interact with other humans, and that demands morals.
SvaraRaderaZ, who likes abortions? I don't like abortions anymore than I like any other kind of invasive surgery. They're a necessary evil for some individuals.
SvaraRaderaI see it more as a rational stance than an atheist stance to say that a blastula is not a human life. Untill quite late in the pregnancy the fetus is not nearly as complex as say a monkey and I think this should be taken into account.
SvaraRaderaI don't think the potential to human life should be equivalent to a human life... After all it is theoretically possible to turn any one of our cells into a human being (not practicalllily possible today though).
There is no rational reason for saying that life begins at contraception. That argument must be based on the assumption that the soul is created then, and there is no evidence that we even have a soul...
Perhaps atheists are expected to be more liberal in the abortion question because they are on average more rational?
Stalin most likely hated the church if you do some reading on him (overzealous father, kicked out of seminary), and to say that Hitler was an atheist is bullshit. That is pure intellectual dishonesty. He claimed he was doing "God's work" in Mein Kampf. You can't say he wasn't the same type of Christian that you are and then move him straight to atheist.
SvaraRaderaI would take issue with the idea that atheism is necessarily sort of "neutral" about these issues. First, like religions, there are several different types of atheism, so it is difficult to generalise about them. But to say that, for example, Stalin's murderous regime was without connection to his atheism is surely misleading, for it was rooted in his Marxism, in itself a profoundly atheist philosophy. I accept that this characterisation would not be universally agreed on; but at the very least, Marx saw religion as a sort of symptom of repression; and the removal of the repression should (he thought) remove the cause of religion too. However, later marxists were by no means so nuanced; hence Stalin's deliberate persecution of the Russian Orthodox church. As for evils arising from marxism, the words of the Hungarian communist György Lukacs are worth attending to: "the question of legality or illegality reduces itself...for the Communist Party to a mere question of tactics". And "Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to accept the necessity to act wickedly"..."this is the greatest sacrifice revolution asks from us".
SvaraRaderaI submit that such ethics, based as they are on Marx's view of the human as the pinnacle of greatness, are distinctively atheist; for they see all laws and morals as being simply the expression of the bourgeois oppressive society. In other words, marxism is simply incompatible with religion; and thus its ideals are too. Therefore, there is at least one type of atheism that drove its adherents to disgraceful acts on the basis of its atheism (considered in the proper sense of antithesis to theism).
"Beda"
PS Rummel estimates that Soviet Russia murdered 62 000 000 people.