@dedicating-ruckus
In order to believe in objective moral facts, you end up needing some kind of theism. (Not necessarily Christianity, or any other specific variant.) Without it, the only rational grounding you can give for any moral claim will boil down to “because I feel like it”. This can work for individuals (though probably only if they’ve internalized the moral system of a surrounding theistic society), but good luck getting it to pass stably across generations.
I could go one of three ways on this.
- Theists don’t actually believe in something objective. They’ve tricked themselves into thinking they do.
- Of course that’s what a Theist would say.
- If we’re being aggressive about it, it boils down the same way for theists.
Either non-theists can believe in objective moral claims, or theists can’t believe in objective moral claims. Gotta be one or the other.
Then of course, there’s the matter of why should finding the ultimate secular morality be easy? Physics isn’t easy. Chemistry isn’t easy. Mathematics, which isn’t a natural science, isn’t easy.
I’m not sure what your background is like here. You don’t ordinarily seem the type to go off from a position of ignorance, but it’s in fact fairly universal in my experience that vocal internet atheists don’t actually have any understanding of theological arguments.
These arguments basically have the same counter, which is that free will is actually really important, and God does not violate it. By humans’ free will, sovereignty over the material world passed to the Devil, “prince of this world”; this, in short form, is why bad things happen to good people. Similarly, Hell is identified with the state of willing rejection of God; He desires that everyone be saved, but this can’t happen absent the individuals’ decision to accept salvation.
This is a topic that could support (has supported, even) an arbitrary length of arbitrarily detailed argument, which I am surely not the best one to make. Since diving full-speed into theodicy would be fairly tangential to the original question, I’ll not continue along this vein.
“Free Will” is a cop out, and free will has always been a cop out.
Don’t posit beings of infinite power and then make excuses for them not to use that power.
Look, inside you, when you make a decision, that decision must be made somehow. If there is no somehow, then it is random. If there is a 1:1 fixed somehow, then it’s deterministic. If it’s somewhere in-between, probabilistic, then it’s a weighted random.
If you’ve got infinite power, then you’ve got time and resources for infinite mind engineering. If you decide not to bother with that engineering, then the outcome is arbitrary and therefore random. That’s not the kind of freedom you’d need to make to justify Hell.
Either way, you’re going to have a hell of a time, so to speak, getting infinite moral liability to stick to finite agents that were made by someone else who could have made the very laws of reality different but didn’t bother for some reason.
One could posit that God cannot imagine a universe without creating it, but that is not what religion teaches. One could posit that hell is temporary and you’re only there until you change your mind, or that only those who will never ever change their minds will go there, but that isn’t what religion typically teaches.
I’m not going from significant research here either, just general historical knowledge. To formalize my hypothesis a bit, I would say that every time a movement that is ideologically atheist has attained societal control, atrocities have followed on the part of that movement.
This doesn’t make any statement about the behavior of religious governments and power structures; clearly these have also committed atrocities historically. By this standard, I would say that the US has never qualified as atheist (despite getting closer over the late 20th century).
Ruling out religious governments and power structures is cheating.
This hypothesis would suggest that all, or a majority of, anti-religious advocacy is carried forward on the justification of concrete abuses (as universally agreed) on the part of religious people or organizations.
This is not at all my observation. Not all, not even a tenth of anti-religious argument is in this category. Perhaps a hundredth, and of this most is transparent gotcha arguments that are obviously not the interlocuter’s true rejection.
Come now, how much rejection of Communism do you think is because of how badly, historically, Communism has fucked up?
There are always going to be die-hard opposition members no matter how great your ideology is, for any sufficiently large population. It’s a natural variation. But to get bigger than that, your ideology has to have flaws.
I can tell you right now that if the Soviet Union were chill and sitting on $80,000 PPP per-capita income and this was an economic miracle wrought by Communism, I wouldn’t be bothering to oppose it. Lots of other people are like this, and yet you will find me bitching about Communism on this very blog.
The typical tactic here is to pick some modern leftist political position, enshrine it as a moral absolute, and then attack religion for not obeying it. Normal examples include opposition to abortion, gay marriage or divorce.
American religious groups blew an absolutely enormous amount of social capital fighting homosexuality, when homosexuality is only really a problem when combined with something like promiscuity - which, unsurprisingly, is not great for heterosexuals, either.
Now, unless I can cause a secular reasoning against it to catch on, there’s not as much social capital to fight polygamy.
But the real key thing here is that you want to apply literally infinite punishment to something like homosexuality. This is massively disproportionate to any sort of harm that it causes. It would be one thing if it were murder that was being punished in this way, but it isn’t.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept any of these as knock-down moral arguments against religion.
Not the point.
The point is the level of outrage over the actions by atheists, the whole “this is why everyone hates atheists” thing, the sympathizing-with-putting-in-camps, is disproportionate.
It’s entirely understandable that atheists would behave this way without being tools of the devil or even just cynically fighting for personal power.
