Base Appeal 

As I said in my previous post, if someone like Sarah Palin is touring the country going on a dishonest offensive, it’s important to provide some pushback.

Fel wnes i son yn y post yma, dyma’r fideo o’r ddadl ar YouTube.

Mae’r gyfres o’r fideos o’r ddadl gyfan ar gael yma.

Hitchens:

I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim. A paranoid or depressive person—of whom we have many millions in our midst—does not have to end up screaming religious slogans while butchering his fellow creatures. But a paranoid or depressive person who is in regular touch with a jihadist “spiritual leader” is presented with a ready-made script that offers him paradise in exchange for homicide.

Digam o que quiserem, mas este sujeito escreve muito bem. Por sinal, sempre vale lembrar:  ao contrário do que o Satanaldo te disse, ele não é NADA parecido com o Hitchens.

Case in point:

This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society’s principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being “Islamophobic.” (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that’s his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors’ fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.

Discutam.

If you missed this debate on BBC between Cristopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry and two Catholic counterparts, have a look at the five clips below. I found it very interesting indeed. Was it a bit early to push such a bill? I think so! Much too early! They should have given it a few decades at least, and waited for another pope! Or better yet, they should not have come with such a triumphalist bill! See what you think!

Debate – Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett vs Dinesh D’Souza, Shmuley Boteach, Robert Wright. La Ciudad de las Ideas 2009 Re-evolution (English Version)

I strongly hold onto the opinion that the Catholic church is the the greatest force of evil in the world. I’m not alone on this. There was a debate that was all about if they’re a force for good. It features Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry and a couple other people I don’t really care about. Have a look, and make sure you watch the whole thing; all five parts. It’s really quite fascinating!

ok, ok, i know. This is blog # zillion to post about the debate between Hitchens/Frye and the Catholic Church, but i wanted to ‘do my bit to spread the word’

The debate was held about the motion “is the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world?” The audience were asked to vote on the motion before and after the debate. Sorry to spoil it for you but the score was :

678 people voted that the thought the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world
1102 people voted that the Catholic Church is NOT a force for good in the world
346 people were undecided

At the end of the programme there was another chance to vote and the outcome was :

286 people voted that the thought the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world (-410)
1876 people voted that the Catholic Church is NOT a force for good in the world (+774)
34 people were undecided

Speaking for the motion, the laughable (and quite gay-ish) Archbishop John Onaiyekan and the hideous wicked evil Anne Widdecombe MP. Speaking against the motion, the elegant, ‘housian’ Christopher Hitchens `(@ChrisHitchens) and the lovely and utterly charming British actor, writer, Lord of Dance, prince of swimwear & blogger Stephen Fry (@stephenfrye)

PART I out of V

PART II out of V

PART III out of V

PART IV out of V

PART V out of V

——————————————————

Thanks to atheistmediablog on youtube

Much anticipated televised debate, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry arguing against Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe MP on the topic, “Is the Catholic church a force for good in the world? “:

http://tiny.cc/fry

Via Richard Dawkins .net

Enjoy,

TWH

Excellent video of the Intelligence^2 debate entitled “The Catholic church is a force for good in the world”. The Roman Catholics represented by Archbishop of Abuja and wizened virgin UK conservative MP Ann Widdecombe  were trounced by the side of Reason represented by Hitch and Stephen Fry. If the proponents’ devastation was not obvious enough the poll at the end of part 5 hammered the point home. Interestingly the passion was coming mainly from Hitch and Fry (though especially Fry). I am thoroughly encouraged not just by the scale of the defeat but by the swing away from those that initially agreed the motion.

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9EDSKrC8bg

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvDz9_5me74

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0HnNuVVNAQ

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i391gBoEo58

Never mind boxing. This is much, much better. A Catholic bishop and Ann Widdecombe versus Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry on whether or not the Catholic Church is a force for good. Fantastic.

And of course, it’s on YouTube – not that old-fashioned box gathering dust in the corner of your living room….

For my birthday, one of the gifts my sweet wife gave me was the recently released Collision DVD feturing Christopher Hitchens and Doug Wilson.

I had been looking forward to it for quite some time, perhaps months. And I must say I was not disappointed. Its edgy. Its engaging. The music is excellent. The debate is lively, intelligent, and witty.

Check it out for yourself.

Where do these people come from and why do their brains change states with the heat of religious thinking?

The latest victim is Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

Ready for the rabbit hole?

From this article, we read that the Rabbi Chief Lord thinks Islam needs to learn to separate theology from power like the Jews and Christians have already done. That would be a Good Thing. But it takes time. It takes a tolerant religious culture for the Muslims to come to this realization themselves, you see. But Europe is losing its religious toleration. That’s a Bad Thing. In the meantime, Muslim families produce more children than non-Muslim families. Why? Why aren’t European women having more babies? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Well, Lord Rabbi Chief links a declining birthrate to secularism. Secularism causes selfishness. Selfishness stops women from having babies. The solution to thwart such selfishness is religion because religion sanctifies the family and parenthood, safeguards us from relativism, and protects moral principles that allows for freedom. But Lo! Religion is under attack! By whom? Who might do such a dastardly thing? Richard Dawkins! That’s right. Richard Dawkins and his cohort of neo-Darwinian attackers of all that is good, which just so happens to be religion, are responsible for the current decline and eventual fall of Western civilization. Chief Lord Rabbi says so!

Damn those secularists. Killing off a civilizations like this. The nerve. But the question I am left with after reading such a brilliant and  insightful piece by his Chiefiness and Lordship of Rabbinical Sackfulness is: Why didn’t I see it before?

Why didn’t I grasp that Dawkins, by promoting evolutionary theory, has put an entire civilization at risk? I’ve been so blind! Why didn’t I intuit that women couldn’t responsibly handle the freedom from reproduction, greedy piggies that they are, that they were just too damned selfish to be trusted to choose parenthood for themselves? I’ve been such a fool. I’ve been played by that Dawkins, looking to fossils and genes and other such nonsense while around me crumbles – crumbles, I tell you! – a civilization with each new wail of a baby born into a family of Muslim parents. I’ve been deaf as well as blind!

Little did I know that respecting human rights and dignity for all was actually an absurdly stupid thing for me to do because such concerns have already found a safe haven within the loving embrace of religious devotion. Silly me. Nothing says human dignity like standing up for honour killings, and few things can compare with the respect of a person’s rights by means of a suicide bomber. I’ve been had. Not believing in the literal transmutation of cracker to flesh is just too damned selfish of me. If I just believe enough in whatever any religion assures me is the truth, I can do my part to save Western civilization! If I just put aside my concern for science being in the science curriculum and cast out the civ-buster Dawkins from my conscience and learn the controversies like creationism for our ancestry and stork theory for delivering more babies, then I can do my part to make everything all right. Ask not for what my civilization can do for me but what I can procreate on behalf of my civilization! We must, therefore, have religion respected so that women can have more babies and Islam can find peace between power and theology. (Or do we donate $$$ to more Save The Stork foundations? Maybe lobby for more cabbage patch vegetable preserves. I’m not sure… I… I… I don’t know what to think… oh, right, don’t think… be tolerant…)

Phew. Secular evolution almost got me there.

Thank you, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks for saving us all… from our brains.

(unpublished as yet)

Dear Sir,

In my letter of October 10^th I argued towards two conclusions about morality that must be drawn by logical necessity if the premise that a purely naturalistic account of moral values and duties is true.  First, I showed that if God does not exist, then objective moral values cannot exist.  As atheist biologist Michael Ruse writes, “morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”  Second, I echoed atheist philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ deduction that if all human thought and action is reducible to material processes occurring within the body, then human beings cannot possess free will.  Any naturalistic justification for moral accountability is thus contradicted by the fact that human beings are quite literally slaves to their genes.

In his letter of response (Oct 27^th) ‘Taciturnus’ misrepresented my first argument when he wrote, “In seeking to assert Mr. Notman’s belief in God, he would have us believe that we cannot justifiably hold a true sense of moral obligation…”  In seeking to assert his disbelief in a transcendent source of objective moral truth, Taciturnus has ignored the distinction I made between objective and subjective moral truths.  I defined an objective moral truth as one that would be capable of binding individuals irrespective of their belief in its truth value.  For example, to say that the Holocaust was an objectively immoral event, would mean that it would still be immoral even if the Nazis had won the war and killed anyone who opposed them and brainwashed the rest of society into believing that the Holocaust was a morally good event. 

The vast majority of atheistic moral philosophers agree that if God does not exist, then objective moral values cannot exist.  I suggest that Taciturnus agrees with this argument since he takes the view that morality has evolved, “…over centuries of mankind forming colonies to protect and defend and survive, and yes, prosper, materially.” 

That however, leaves him with only subjective moral values which, as I wrote last time, are merely a collection of cultural and socio-biological pressures converging on the individual. Taciturnus seems content with this explanation of morality, for he believes that whilst we may have a way to go yet, “each step we take forges a deepening understanding of who we are and of what dreams, what personal sacrifices, what achievements, what compassion, and of what morality we are capable.  And yes, of course, of what horrors we are capable.”

How ironic then, for Taciturnus to credit Charles Darwin for providing a “milestone in mankind’s moral progress.”  Darwin’s contribution to the equivocal term ‘evolution’, which until the publication of his work meant simply ‘change over time’ was the hypothesis that this change was unguided, random and purposeless.  Taciturnus’ optimistic faith in a naturalistic progression from mankind “bellowing and beating our breasts” to some future, objectively true moral plane of human existence through the process of Darwinian evolution demonstrates that he does not understand that such a progression is fundamentally antithetical to the Darwinian hypothesis. 

Darwinism makes no distinction between what ‘is’ moral and what ‘ought’ to be moral because ‘ought’ implies purpose and therefore, design. Darwin himself, though in many ways a very good man, understood that his theory demanded that every moral standard throughout history is no more or less ‘good’ than any other because there can be no objective standard by which to compare it. 

Taciturnus is beating the same drum as Chris Hitchens in declaring his moral outrage against what he believes to be the “adverse judgment of a fearsome deity”, whilst holding to a philosophical worldview that specifically denies the existence of an objective standard from which to evaluate moral action.  He is trying to have it both ways by believing that we are evolving towards a more moral state of development, but by means of an evolutionary process that cannot acknowledge moral development in either direction.  This is specifically why I conclude my last letter by saying the naturalist is consigned to a world of make-believe moral values and freedoms in the face of certain nihilism.

Taciturnus writes that we have a “better chance of dealing with our shortcomings if we hold ourselves accountable.”  Yet he makes no attempt to refute my second argument, that Man is no more than a complex machine with no genuine free will and thus can be held no more morally accountable for his actions if he enjoys killing kittens instead of petting them.  Either way, Man is simply doing what the material processes that compose his body compel him to do.  How is it then that some complex meat machines get to determine that other complex meat machines have shortcomings for which they ‘ought’ to be held morally accountable, given that all are slaves to their genes?  Since reductive determinism is consistent with naturalism being true, Taciturnus must be able to provide a rationale for moral accountability when all human action is reduced to material processes governed by the same laws that produce rain showers and belly button lint.

He thus failed to address the philosophical problems I raised against naturalism. Of course, even if Taciturnus were to somehow defeat Christianity with a fatal stab of rhetoric, that still would not make naturalism necessarily true as there are other religious worldviews that make claims to truth that are fundamentally different from those of Christian theism, but are also antagonistic towards pure naturalism.

Taciturnus cited nothing to applaud in religion, but much to condemn it, particularly Christianity.  Whilst choosing only to cite instances of Christians failing to live up to their system of beliefs may win him points among those favourable to his view, it is as specious as claiming Christianity is true because some Christians live good and righteous lives.

Human evil confirms the Christian doctrine of the depraved nature of Man, which according to The Federalist Papers, was accepted by the Founding Fathers when drafting the American Constitution.

In addition to the Constitution, bear in mind also that Rosa Parks, Rev. (Taciturnus failed to include the Rev. title) Dr. Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have something else in common besides being hailed by Taciturnus as milestones of moral progress.  They were also profoundly devout Christians whose work to defeat the evils of oppression and intolerance was inspired by their belief in and devotion to a God whom Taciturnus apparently thinks is a moral monster that thankfully does not exist.

Perhaps however, Taciturnus, you might now be persuaded to follow the examples of these great moral teachers and seek the transcendent source of all Moral Good through the person of Jesus Christ?  You are always welcome at His table and at my own, with a glass of single malt in hand, as we attempt to solve the problems of the world together.    

Stephen Notman

www.psalmtrees.org

Milestones of progress

October 15, 2009

Dear Sir,

I for one am delighted to see such letters as Stephen Notman’s discourse on the merits of the morality of Naturalism and Materialism, versus the morality of the spiritual: “Where naturalism errs” on October 10. When an approach to faith is given a foundation in intellectual argument, the argument can become so persuasive, so alluring and seductive that only towards the end where a great flying leap of summation of the argument is made, three columns in, can credulity become incredulity, the illusion wrought by smoke and mirrors at once transparent, and the suspension of critical thought abandoned in favour of the resumption of common sense.

Mr. Notman’s assertion: “Contrary then to the assertions of Dawkins and others, a naturalistic world view cannot provide a philosophically justifiable foundation for moral duties and obligations. In order to avoid the insanity of moral chaos, the naturalist is forced to live an irrational life of make-believe values and freedoms, denying with wishful thinking what he knows to be true about the nihilistic nature of reality.”

True morality can only be based on belied in “the goodness of virtue being rooted in something transcendent to the virtue”? In seeking to assert Mr. Notman’s belief in God he would have us believe that we cannot justifiably hold a true sense of moral obligation if that moral obligation is derived from simple evolutionary processes, rather than being something outside of ourselves and our naturalistic material world. I think that the opposite is true.

Secular law and community traditions and social fabric have developed over centuries of mankind forming colonies to protect and defend and survive, and yes, prosper, materially. The morality developed is based on the needs of the society, not on some vague promise of either an afterlife or the threat of the adverse judgment of a fearsome deity if you don’t play by the rules, or the horrifying prospect of the hot-forged penalty of being consigned to the outstretched welcoming flames of his alter-ego.

The entire history of those driven by this sense that right and wrong are part of God’s fabric of the universe is a history of bloody, ruthless, cruel, and unforgiving conflict, intimidation, bribery and political intrigue, and the imposition of sectarian views on those on the outside of such sects, and slaughter, literal and metaphoric, of those in breach of their tenets. Incidentally, “spiritual” morality has fluctuated much more than temporal morality. A few years ago it was OK for Christians to slaughter native peoples and Muslims, and to enslave Africans, and to butcher and burn the deranged, and carry a handbook entitled “Malleus Malificarum” on how to torture witches, i.e., the deranged, to death or confession … and death. And then get on one’s knees and thank God for the opportunity to act in his service.

If this is the influence of recognising that true morality is spiritual – give me temporal and secular at all times! We have a better chance of dealing with our shortcomings if we hold ourselves accountable, and not blame our slaughterous inclinations on a higher sense of morality woven into the fabric of the universe by its creator.

I think Mr. Notman’s discourse and conclusion err, not naturalism or materialism. We are what we are and I think that at the end of the day, we haven’t made such a bad job of standing on our two legs, bellowing and beating our breasts, grunting and growling, learning how to dominate and be submissive, and learning how to live within the tribe of mankind in mankind’s backyard and the greater neighbourhood, and how to navigate the swamps, sail the oceans, fly the skies, and negotiate the jungles, and even care for the future of our jungles and our descendants, and make things, and make pictures and signs to communicate with each other.

Not that we haven’t a-ways to go yet, but each step we take forges a deepening understanding of who we are and of what dreams, what personal sacrifices, what achievements, what compassion, and of what morality we are capable. And, yes, of course, of what horrors we are capable.

Magna Carta, The American Constitution, Dr. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parkes, Raoul Wallenberg, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Wilberforce, and Charles Darwin, are but a few random examples of many, many milestones in mankind’s moral progress.

“The insanity of moral chaos” is not the product of either Naturalism or Materialism. It is the direct result of bigotries and discriminations, and religio-nationalisms which commenced in pagan times and were embraced opportunistically by later religions, and which have arisen from sectarian beliefs promulgated under duress by centuries of clashing dogmata and their mitred warlords, fighting for supremacy of ideas and killing millions in their destructive paths. And yet we still prevail.

TACITURNUS

Southampton

Dear Sir,
 
It seems that the Almighty is coming under another wave of attacks from popular authors such as Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright and ‘novelist’, Dan Brown. 

 Karen Armstrong’s recent ‘Case for God’ is reliably erudite but it offers no rebuttal since in her view God should best be viewed as a symbol of pluralistic humanity.  Dawkins has cannily responded to Armstrong’s book by declaring she is really an atheist, just of a different variety.

Whilst I agree with Dawkins about Armstrong, I would like however to offer a few thoughts on naturalism and materialism as they comprise the philosophical foundations for his atheistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that all matter and energy in the physical universe is all that has or ever will exist.  Naturalism excludes the existence of any non-material reality, including God, from the realm of discoverable knowledge through science.  This only limits what science can achieve; it does not necessarily exclude the existence of a non-material reality.  However, an overwhelming majority of naturalists are also materialists.  Materialism categorically denies the existence of any non-material, spiritual reality.

Naturalism views man as a complex interrelation of chemical and physical processes.  No human soul exists, nor is there an afterlife.  We are nothing more than collections of molecules whose capacities for intelligence, self-awareness and introspection, as well as apprehension of beauty, truth and virtue are merely the accidental outcome of a blind, purposeless, undirected process of biological evolution. 

If human beings are just the purposeless, accidental process of “goo to you by way of the zoo”, what then can be said about morality?  In the absence of a transcendent moral realm of objective moral values, it follows that human moral values are merely social conventions without a logically sufficient foundation for moral obligation and human dignity.  By ‘objective’ moral values I am referring to moral values that are true such that they are capable of imposing valid and binding obligations on the individual regardless of whether or not he believes in their truth value.  On naturalism, morality is reduced to a collection of cultural and socio-biological pressures converging on the individual.  As atheist biologist Michael Ruse writes, “morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”

If objective moral values do not exist and morality is merely a social illusion, then if one chooses to reject such an illusion the worst that can be said of him is that he is being anti-social.  There is no philosophically justifiable way on a subjective view of morality to say that something like rape is actually wrong or that the Holocaust is an objective evil.  Moral motivation to abide by the tenets of an ‘illusion’ is thus easily undermined.

Let me stress that this is not an argument that a naturalistic worldview makes you a bad person.  I am not making the argument that you have to believe in God or objective moral values in order to act morally.  What I am arguing however, is that if morality is merely subjective, then moral standards such as “The Golden Rule” or “Do no harm” are applicable only to the person who chooses that standard.  But no subjective basis for a moral standard that makes a virtue of things like tolerance and equality can be deemed ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than a chosen alternative standard that instead upholds qualities like dishonesty and bigotry as virtues. 

I am sure you agree that tolerance is ‘better’ than bigotry.  But to agree that one set of values is better than another set of values is to appeal to some immaterially existing standard of objectivity, whereby the goodness of a virtue is rooted in something transcendent to the virtue.  But this immaterial transcendence is the very thing that naturalism and materialism deny.

On a naturalistic view of morality, the difference between right and wrong is determined solely by whoever has the means and will to impose their preferences upon a society.  Historically, this is achieved either by coercing the population into accepting their standard via systematic indoctrination using cultural mediums like the news-media, Hollywood and the university; or imposing it by force such as in the case of Stalinist Russia.

Thus, whilst it would be fallacious to say that a naturalistic worldview ‘caused’ Pol Pot’s killing fields or Stalin’s gulag, it does follow however that a naturalistic worldview enables such atrocities to occur by denying the existence of any objective duties and obligations capable of saying that they are actually wrong.  We can only say that we think that what they did was wrong because we prefer a different moral standard from the ones they adopted.

And yet so often I find examples of naturalists speaking as though objective moral values do exist, particularly when they are criticizing Christian morality.  Christopher Hitchens, for example, will deny the existence of all possible Gods, almost solely on the basis of his moral outrage against the so-called tyrannical God of the Bible.  In doing so, not only is he contradicting the internal logic of the materialist presupposition that all morals are an illusion, but he is also appealing to a moral standard that he thinks is objectively ‘better’ than the Biblical standard.  We have seen however, that a naturalist worldview does not support the ability to make such a claim. 

Not only are moral values an illusion on naturalism, but we are, in fact, slaves to our genes.  The 17^th century great modern atheist Thomas Hobbes proclaimed that since everything was made up of matter, human beings have no free will because all our ideas, desires and actions are simply material reactions.  This is the inner logic of materialism and its adoption by mainstream science leads to the denial of moral responsibility.  Dr. Benjamin Wiker reasons that, “The assertion of complete materialist determinism necessarily means that one’s actions are the result of physical processes that follow laws, and that means, in turn that a human being is no more responsible for its actions than are hydrogen atoms, rocks, or trees.” 

The outlook for a rationally defensible basis for morality upon a naturalist worldview is bleak, given that many advocates now openly deny moral responsibility.  Thus, we are treated with greater regularity to articles such as one which appeared in a recent edition of Discovery magazine, asserting that science has successfully reduced the “Seven Deadly Sins” to chemical reactions over which the individual has no control and therefore cannot be found morally responsible.

Whilst acknowledging a lack of moral responsibility challenges the rationale for punishing anti-social behavior, historically it has also provided a ready excuse to commit mass murder in an effort to rid society of those who were deemed genetically ‘unfit’ to procreate.

Contrary then to the assertions of Dawkins and others, a naturalistic worldview cannot provide a philosophically justifiable foundation for moral duties and obligations.  In order to avoid the insanity of moral chaos, the naturalist is forced to live an irrational life of make-believe values and freedoms, denying with wishful thinking what he knows to be true about the nihilistic nature of reality.

This is part of a larger article that I’ve written which you can access at www.psalmtrees.org

Stephen Notman

Paget

Where naturalism errs

October 4, 2009

Dear Sir,

It seems that the Almighty is coming under another wave of attacks from popular authors such as Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright and “novelist” Dan Brown. Karen Armstrong’s recent “Case for God” is reliably erudite but it offers no rebuttal since in her view God should best be viewed as a symbol of pluralistic humanity. Dawkins has cannily responded to Armstrong’s book by declaring she is really an atheist, just of a different variety.

Whilst I agree with Dawkins about Armstrong, I would like however to offer a few thoughts on naturalism and materialism as they comprise the philosophical foundations for his atheistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that all matter and energy in the physical universe is all that has or ever will exist. Naturalism excludes the existence of any non-material reality, including God, from the realm of discoverable knowledge through science.

This only limits what science can achieve; it does not necessarily exclude the existence of a non-material reality. However, an overwhelming majority of naturalists are also materialists. Materialism categorically denies the existence of any non-material, spiritual reality.

Naturalism views man as a complex interrelation of chemical and physical processes. No human soul exists, nor is there an afterlife.

We are nothing more than collections of molecules whose capacities for intelligence, self-awareness and introspection, as well as apprehension of beauty, truth and virtue are merely the accidental outcome of a blind, purposeless, undirected process of biological evolution.

If human beings are just the purposeless, accidental process of “goo to you by way of the zoo”, what then can be said about morality? In the absence of a transcendent moral realm of objective moral values, it follows that human moral values are merely social conventions without a logically sufficient foundation for moral obligation and human dignity. By “objective” moral values, I am referring to moral values that are true such that they are capable of imposing valid and binding obligations on the individual regardless of whether or not he believes in their truth value. On naturalism, morality is reduced to a collection of cultural and socio-biological pressures converging on the individual. As atheist biologist Michael Ruse writes, “morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes”.

If objective moral values do not exist and morality is merely a social illusion, then if one chooses to reject such an illusion, the worst that can be said of him is that he is being anti-social. There is no philosophically justifiable way on a subjective view of morality to say that something like rape is actually wrong or that the Holocaust is an objective evil. Moral motivation to abide by the tenets of an “illusion” is thus easily undermined.

Let me stress that this is not an argument that a naturalistic worldview makes you a bad person. I am not making the argument that you have to believe in God or objective moral values in order to act morally. However, if morality is merely subjective, then moral standards such as “The Golden Rule” or “do no harm” are applicable only to the person who chooses that standard. But no subjective basis for a moral standard that makes a virtue of things like tolerance and equality can be deemed “better” or “worse” than a chosen alternative standard that instead upholds qualities like dishonesty and bigotry as virtues.

I am sure you agree that tolerance is “better” than bigotry. But to agree that one set of values is better than another set of values is to appeal to some immaterially existing standard of objectivity, whereby the goodness of a virtue is rooted in something transcendent to the virtue. But this immaterial transcendence is the very thing that naturalism and materialism deny.

In a naturalistic view of morality, the difference between right and wrong is determined solely by whoever has the means and will to impose their preferences upon a society. Historically, this is achieved either by coercing the population into accepting their standard via systematic indoctrination using cultural mediums like the news media, Hollywood and the university; or imposing it by force as in the case of Stalinist Russia.

Thus, whilst it would be fallacious to say that a naturalistic worldview “caused” Pol Pot’s killing fields or Stalin’s gulag, it does follow however that a naturalistic worldview enables such atrocities to occur by denying the existence of any objective duties and obligations capable of saying that they are actually wrong. We can only say that we think that what they did was wrong because we prefer a different moral standard from the ones they adopted.

And yet so often I find examples of naturalists speaking as though objective moral values do exist, particularly when they are criticising Christian morality. Christopher Hitchens, for example, will deny the existence of all possible Gods, almost solely on the basis of his moral outrage against the so-called tyrannical God of the Bible. In doing so, not only is he contradicting the internal logic of the materialist presupposition that all morals are an illusion, but he is also appealing to a moral standard that he thinks is objectively “better” than the Biblical standard. We have seen however, that a naturalist worldview does not support the ability to make such a claim.

Not only are moral values an illusion on naturalism, but we are, in fact, slaves to our genes. The 17th Century great modern atheist Thomas Hobbes proclaimed that since everything was made up of matter, human beings have no free will because all our ideas, desires and actions are simply material reactions. This is the inner logic of materialism and its adoption by mainstream science leads to the denial of moral responsibility. Dr. Benjamin Wiker reasons that: “The assertion of complete materialist determinism necessarily means that one’s actions are the result of physical processes that follow laws, and that means, in turn that a human being is no more responsible for its actions than are hydrogen atoms, rocks, or trees.”

The outlook for a rationally defensible basis for morality upon a naturalist worldview is bleak, given that many advocates now openly deny moral responsibility. Thus, we are treated with greater regularity to articles such as one which appeared in a recent edition of Discovery magazine, asserting that science has successfully reduced the “Seven Deadly Sins” to chemical reactions over which the individual has no control and therefore cannot be found morally responsible.

Whilst acknowledging a lack of moral responsibility challenges the rationale for punishing anti-social behaviour, historically it has also provided a ready excuse to commit mass murder in an effort to rid society of those who were deemed genetically “unfit” to procreate.

Contrary then to the assertions of Dawkins and others, a naturalistic worldview cannot provide a philosophically justifiable foundation for moral duties and obligations. In order to avoid the insanity of moral chaos, the naturalist is forced to live an irrational life of make-believe values and freedoms, denying with wishful thinking what he knows to be true about the nihilistic nature of reality.

This is part of a larger article that I’ve written which you can access at www.psalmtrees.org

STEPHEN NOTMAN

Paget

How many time have you heard the comparison that atheists are as fundamental in their ‘belief’ as any religious extremist? Frank Schaeffer has written a stupendously ignorant article over at Alternet that maligns Dawkins and Hitchens as equally pathological in their certainty as the evangelical fundamentalists Robertson and Haggard.

I know a deranged faith-based personality cult when I see one, he states.

In comparison, he uses Dennett as the kind of atheist he likes, a calm and quiet voice of reason. He explains

One reason I find Dennett so appealing is his decency. His humility, wit, and empathy speak volumes to me and lends a solid gravity to his wisdom.

Wisdom like the theme of Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell, the thesis described by Schaeffer as

humans are like ants whose brains have been infected by a parasite.

According to Schaeffer, religious belief to Dennet is like a parasitic  infection, which is oh so compassionate compared to the fundamentalist certainty offered to us by Dawkins that describes religious belief as merely a delusion. The thought probably never occurred to Scheaffer to recall the title of the Dennett’s book, that religion holds a great many people in something akin to a spell that needs to be broken. But I expect too much of the perspicacious Schaeffer. His insight is too great to pick up on that title. A spell is not the same thing as an infection, except we would do well to remember that Schaeffer doesn’t seem to use – or be able to utilize – the same dictionary as the rest of us writers of English. Nor does he give bother to credit Dawkins with Dennett’s reliance on the idea of religion as a meme. Schaeffer couldn’t possibly do that to the terrible Dawkins who coined the term to describe how cultural ideas and practices can be transmitted between people.

Like his inability to grasp the importance of a title, Schaeffer fails to appreciate any motivation Dawkins may have had beyond the creation of a cult to address the effects of religious belief. It’s just a little something, I will grant you, but he tramples on Dawkins reputation as an evolutionary biologist by omitting what that motivation might be – a motivation slightly greater than selling trinkets perhaps. I doubt Schaeffer is even capable of considering the fact that Dawkins is responding to a concerted attack by a very powerful group of religious proponents against the fundamental principle that informs all of biology, namely, the theory of evolution. Dawkins takes that misinformation campaign against his discipline very seriously and perhaps can be forgiven if he sometimes reveals his passion for evolution’s truth claims when back by lots and lots of evidence.

If Dennett, by comparison, had philosophy purposefully undermined at every step of his professional career, including a highly financed campaign to replace it in the schools with biblical mutterings and other theological Armstrong-ian deepities (God is not a being, God is the god behind the god drivel) then perhaps Dennett might not be quite so willing to tolerate religion’s social pluses and minuses.

But the major complaint Scheaffer has against Dawkins is that his web site sells stuff. THAT’S what makes Dawkins a REAL fundamentalist, a personality cultist. He natters on about Hitchens in much the same ad hominem vein, attributing his religious hostility to his relationships with his religious brother as well as his religious ex-wife.

If you are hoping to understand the link Schaeffer makes between fundamentalism and atheism, then read no farther than this: it is simply that some of the most popularly read atheists have a passionate personality, which therefore defines their message merely as an ingredient to obtain the cult that supposedly goes along with such fundamentalism.

?

All other considerations are secondary to that keen if incomprehensible insight. And a personality cult is fundamentalism, let us not forget, because our esteemed Schaeffer says so. Such is the refined definition that so exceedingly betters the simplistic version of religious belief criticized by the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. As for their message? It’s all wrong, of course, as Schaeffer’s cherry picked quotations and hugely biased interpretation of them can attest. Dennett is absolved by His Worshipfulness because, well, because Dennett seems so much nicer. Thus we can be gob-smacked at the profundity of  Schaeffer’s conclusion:

If Hitchens being Hitchens is an example of those “hardwon human attainments,” the rest of us would do well to avoid them. If Dawkins messianic/commercial website is the future of atheism, we might just be entering a new age of religion pushed there by the reaction to the reaction against religion. What a zinger! Religion will grow because of the reaction to these ‘cults of personalities.’

Oh please. What tripe.

Read the entire long winded diatribe here if you can do so without bleeding from the ears.

THE ONLY POWER SOCIALISM HAS, IS WHEN PEOPLE BELIEVE IN ITS DECEPTIONS:

HEATHEN CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS BURNING COALS IS EVIDENCED BY HIS LIES. WHEN ONE HAS TO RESORT TO LIES, IN AN ATTEMPT TO ASSUAGE ONE’S CONSCIOUS – ONE LIVES WITH BURNING COALS!

CHRISTOPHER HITCHEN’S HERO!

ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA - MASS MURDERER FOR CASTRO. HERE SHOWN AFTER EXECUTION IN BOLIVIA FOR CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST HUMANITY.

ROMANS 12: 9-21

Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good;

love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor.

Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.

Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality.

⁶ Bless those who persecute (you), bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all.

If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.

Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

Rather, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.”

Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.

Nietzsche’s ultimate philosophical destination in fact lead to Hitler’s conclusion, that assisting the weak, makes one an enemy of human advancement.

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

 

Mother Teresa

 

The Nobel Peace Prize 1979

“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus. ”Small of stature, rocklike in faith, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was entrusted with the mission of proclaiming God’s thirsting love for humanity, especially for the poorest of the poor. “God still loves the world and He sends you and me to be His love and His compassion to the poor.”She was a soul filled with the light of Christ, on fire with love for Him and burning with one desire: “to quench His thirst for love and for souls.”

This luminous messenger of God’s love was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, a city situated at the crossroads of Balkan history. The youngest of the children born to Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu, she was baptised Gonxha Agnes, received her First Communion at the age of five and a half and was confirmed in November 1916. From the day of her First Holy Communion, a love for souls was within her. Her father’s sudden death when Gonxha was about eight years old left in the family in financial straits. Drane raised her children firmly and lovingly, greatly influencing her daughter’s character and vocation. Gonxha’s religious formation was further assisted by the vibrant Jesuit parish of the Sacred Heart in which she was much involved.

At the age of eighteen, moved by a desire to become a missionary, Gonxha left her home in September 1928 to join the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as the Sisters of Loreto, in Ireland. There she received the name Sister Mary Teresa after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In December, she departed for India, arriving in Calcutta on 6 January 1929. After making her First Profession of Vows in May 1931, Sister Teresa was assigned to the Loreto Entally community in Calcutta and taught at St. Mary’s School for girls. On 24 May 1937, Sister Teresa made her Final Profession of Vows, becoming, as she said, the “spouse of Jesus”for “all eternity.” From that time on she was called Mother Teresa. She continued teaching at St. Mary’s and in 1944 became the school’s principal. A person of profound prayer and deep love for her religious sisters and her students, Mother Teresa’s twenty years in Loreto were filled with profound happiness. Noted for her charity, unselfishness and courage, her capacity for hard work and a natural talent for organization, she lived out her consecration to Jesus, in the midst of her companions, with fidelity and joy.

On 10 September 1946 during the train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, Mother Teresa received her “inspiration,” her “call within a call.” On that day, in a way she would never explain, Jesus’ thirst for love and for souls took hold of her heart and the desire to satiate His thirst became the driving force of her life. Over the course of the next weeks and months, by means of interior locutions and visions, Jesus revealed to her the desire of His heart for “victims of love” who would “radiate His love on souls.” “Come be My light,” He begged her. “I cannot go alone.” He revealed His pain at the neglect of the poor, His sorrow at their ignorance of Him and His longing for their love. He asked Mother Teresa to establish a religious community, Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to the service of the poorest of the poor. Nearly two years of testing and discernment passed before Mother Teresa received permission to begin. On August 17, 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white, blue-bordered sari and passed through the gates of her beloved Loreto convent to enter the world of the poor.

After a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta and found temporary lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor. On 21 December she went for the first time to the slums. She visited families, washed the sores of some children, cared for an old man lying sick on the road and nursed a woman dying of hunger and TB. She started each day in communion with Jesus in the Eucharist and then went out, rosary in her hand, to find and serve Him in “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for.” After some months, she was joined, one by one, by her former students.

On 7 October 1950 the new congregation of the Missionaries of Charity was officially established in the Archdiocese of Calcutta. By the early 1960s, Mother Teresa began to send her Sisters to other parts of India. The Decree of Praise granted to the Congregation by Pope Paul VI in February 1965 encouraged her to open a house in Venezuela. It was soon followed by foundations in Rome and Tanzania and, eventually, on every continent. Starting in 1980 and continuing through the 1990s, Mother Teresa opened houses in almost all of the communist countries, including the former Soviet Union, Albania and Cuba.

In order to respond better to both the physical and spiritual needs of the poor, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity Brothers in 1963, in 1976 the contemplative branch of the Sisters, in 1979 the Contemplative Brothers, and in 1984 the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.Yet her inspiration was not limited to those with religious vocations. She formed the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa and the Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, people of many faiths and nationalities with whom she shared her spirit of prayer, simplicity, sacrifice and her apostolate of humble works of love. This spirit later inspired the Lay Missionaries of Charity. In answer to the requests of many priests, in 1981 Mother Teresa also began the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests as a “little way of holiness” for those who desire to share in her charism and spirit.

During the years of rapid growth the world began to turn its eyes towards Mother Teresa and the work she had started. Numerous awards, beginning with the Indian Padmashri Award in 1962 and notably the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, honoured her work, while an increasingly interested media began to follow her activities. She received both prizes and attention “for the glory of God and in the name of the poor.”

The whole of Mother Teresa’s life and labour bore witness to the joy of loving, the greatness and dignity of every human person, the value of little things done faithfully and with love, and the surpassing worth of friendship with God. But there was another heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, “the darkness.” The “painful night” of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor.

During the last years of her life, despite increasingly severe health problems, Mother Teresa continued to govern her Society and respond to the needs of the poor and the Church. By 1997, Mother Teresa’s Sisters numbered nearly 4,000 members and were established in 610 foundations in 123 countries of the world. In March 1997 she blessed her newly-elected successor as Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity and then made one more trip abroad. After meeting Pope John Paul II for the last time, she returned to Calcutta and spent her final weeks receiving visitors and instructing her Sisters. On 5 September Mother Teresa’s earthly life came to an end. She was given the honour of a state funeral by the Government of India and her body was buried in the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity. Her tomb quickly became a place of pilgrimage and prayer for people of all faiths, rich and poor alike. Mother Teresa left a testament of unshakable faith, invincible hope and extraordinary charity. Her response to Jesus’ plea, “Come be My light,” made her a Missionary of Charity, a “mother to the poor,” a symbol of compassion to the world, and a living witness to the thirsting love of God.

Less than two years after her death, in view of Mother Teresa’s widespread reputation of holiness and the favours being reported, Pope John Paul II permitted the opening of her Cause of Canonization. On 20 December 2002 he approved the decrees of her heroic virtues and miracles.

I posted yesterday about Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts on Christians that he’s debated and one reader responded with a different, secularist perspective (which we welcome here!).  I was going to respond to them in the comments section, but I found my response becoming a bit too long and figured I would put it up in a separate post since it had some serious thoughts on what makes Christianity unique.  This is by no means exhaustive, but only a surface-level introduction to ‘why Christianity’ rather than Islam, or Buddhism, etc.

Here we go….

1.  The existence of God cannot and does not need to be demonstrated.  It is evident and is no more subject to “proof” than “disproof.” This is not similar to anything else, no matter how hard we try to draw correlations to spaghetti monsters (cf. Bertrand Russell), etc.  Such elusive arguments actually fail to consider the definition of what they’re arguing about.  I’m not interested in arguing for the existence of “deity” in and of itself.  I’m an atheist in many respects:  I don’t believe in “Allah” or the god of Judaism or the gods of Mormonism, et al.  I believe in the one God revealed in Jesus Christ.  He has been seen and we have eye-witness testimony to this event and his deity. 

Rational proofs for/against the existence of some otiose deity dangling before our eyes are rather vain projections of our own minds onto a blank canvas (thank you Cornelius Van Til).  They are thus fruitless.  I can understand why a “secularist” would want to go down this road, but we share different presuppositions and thus have no neutral ground from which to argue.  Someone might retort and say, “Reason is the only neutral ground, why not simply agree to the dictates of logic and reason and then go from there?”  Ok, fine, but whose reason?  Reason is not an abstract, independent reality floating outside of actual people, outside of time and space.  Reason is built upon the foundations of beliefs that people assume without argumentation (“presuppositions).  Thus, reason is anything but neutral.  I might just as well say that your perspective assumes the non-existence of something you call “god,” for which there is no evidence.  I hope I’m being concrete enough with what I’m saying. 

Furthermore, we cannot speak of the “non-existence” of the God revealed in Jesus Christ because existence is part of his very definition.  To say otherwise would be to separate the signifier from signified.  Most people haven’t made the proper correlation between the two such that they posit the non-existence of something they claim is the Christian God, when in fact they have something wholly different in their sights.  This is what makes Richard Dawkins such an amateur in this respect and why no philosopher or theologian has yet to take him seriously.  Yhwh is self-existing (‘a se‘ in Latin), thus requiring no cause for himself, etc.

2.  SO, if we start from the fact of Jesus Christ, then we actually have something to work with.  We know about him through Scripture, which then leads to all sorts of questions as to how that’s interpreted, etc.  I don’t have time to get too far into this (I’m not going to convince anyone anyway), but the gospel - the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ alone from our sinful separation from God – is the basis for racial and sexual equality, for nonviolence, for the inherent value of human life.  Other religions might profess to hold to similar beliefs, but they are actually radically different. 

If you cannot see this, it is because you are not a follower of Christ.  So you can’t see the ways in which the value of human life is bound up with the fact that God has shared our time and space with us by assuming flesh, and in that same act, redeemed us.  You don’t understand what it means to be made in the image of Yhwh, rather than to made in the image of “god.”  You can’t see the intricacies of the many ways that the gospel breaks down social divisions and makes everyone equal beggars at the foot of the cross.  You don’t understand how race is a sinful human taxonomy that finds little basis in our ontology.  According to Scripture, you are either “in Christ” or “in Adam;” redeemed or not.  You don’t see how Grace removes privilege.  Neither can you see how the creating activity of a TRIUNE God (as opposed to any other “god”) ontologically grounds proper relations between the sexes and proper sexual relations.  You cannot grasp the depth with which Christ’s death on the cross puts an end to coercive force and violence.

My point is this:  I cannot show you all these things because you would not believe them, but Christian answers are just as hostile to other religions’ answers as your own brand of secularism is.  They are not the same, not even close.  Why do we all find an inherent need for racial equality, sexual equality, nonviolence, etc?  It cannot point to a condition prior to God’s creating activity.  If you posit that, then you have to explain how it is human life can have any inherent (read: not culturally or socially assigned) value in a secular system. 

Instead, the answer is that all of these things – these values and longings – are built into the fabric of who we were created to image.  Christians say that image is Christ.  When you begin to understand the colossal implications of that view, then you begin to understand how Christianity is not one religion amongst many.  Instead, it stands opposed to all forms of human religion.  It stands opposed to all human ideologies.  When it stands properly, it stands alone in this world as the consequence of a summons to discipleship; to humbly, obediently, and faithfully follow Christ, our creator and the only true image of God.

So, why not Islam?  Why not Judaism?  Why not Buddhism?  Why not secularism?  Why not any other “peaceful” religion?  Because they cannot explain everything and thus cannot explain anything.  That is a dogmatic claim, I realize.  But it gets back to my point in yesterday’s post about being sincere.  I’m not trying to convince, only clarify….