If there is no God, the labels \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil\u201d are merely opinions. They are substitutes for \u201cI like it\u201d and \u201cI don\u2019t like it.\u201d They are not objective realities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thank you, Mr. Prager.\u00a0 I couldn’t have said it better myself.\u00a0 That is a perfectly clear and straightforward statement of a simple truth that so many of my fellow “rational” atheists seem completely unable to grasp.\u00a0 There is simply no\u00a0mechanism whereby the moral emotions in the mind\u00a0of one individual can stroll over, smack another individual up alongside the head, and acquire the legitimacy to apply to that other individual as well.\u00a0 Atheist moralists are like so many zombies, still wandering aimlessly about in their imaginary world of good and evil even though they’ve just been shot between the eyes.\u00a0 The bullet that hit them\u00a0is the realization that evolved behavioral predispositions are the ultimate cause of moral behavior.\u00a0 As Mr. Prager says, they do, indeed, have very pronounced opinions about the precise nature of Good and Evil.\u00a0 The problem is that such opinions are analogous to having opinions about the color of a unicorns horn.\u00a0 They are opinions about objects that don’t exist.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, belief in imaginary super beings is just as ineffectual as the fantasies of the atheists when it comes to conjuring up Good and Evil Things and endowing them with objective reality.\u00a0\u00a0Consider, for example, the rest of Mr. Prager’s article.\u00a0 It’s basically a statement of the familiar fallacy that, because (Judeo-Christian)\u00a0God-based morality results in Good (as imagined by Mr. Prager), and atheist morality results in Evil (as imagined by Mr. Prager), therefore God must exist.\u00a0 In fact, there is no logical mechanism whereby the mind of Mr. Prager can force God from non-existence into existence by virtue of the fact that a God is required to transmute his Good and his Evil into objective realities.\u00a0 The truth of God’s existence or non-existence does not depend on Mr. Prager’s opinion touching on how his presence might affect the moral climate.<\/p>\n
No matter, Prager stumbles on with his version of the now familiar “proof” that (Judeo-Christian)\u00a0God-based moral systems result in Good, but secular ones result in Evil, and that the (Judeo-Christian) God must therefore exist.\u00a0 Apparently he knows enough history to realize that to believe this “proof” it is necessary to stand reality on its head.\u00a0 The\u00a0slaughter of countless Jews through the ages, the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent women as “witches,” the\u00a0extermination of the Albigensians, the decades of bloody warfare conducted by “good” Christians to stamp out the Hussite heresy, the slaughter of the French Huguenots, and countless other similar events are the real legacy of Christianity.\u00a0 Prager is aware of this, and so would have us believe that Christianity has been successfully “tamed” in the 20th century.\u00a0 As he puts it,<\/p>\n
But if that isn\u2019t enough, how about the record of the godless 20th century, the cruelest, bloodiest, most murderous century on record? Every genocide of the last century \u2014 except for the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians and the Pakistani mass murder of Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) \u2014 was committed by a secular anti-Jewish and anti-Christian regime. And as the two exceptions were Muslim, they are not relevant to my argument. I am arguing for the God and Bible of Judeo-Christian religions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In fact, the God and Bible of the Judeo-Christian religions weren’t as spotless as all that, even in the 20th century.\u00a0 Consider, for example, the bloody history of the “Black Hundreds<\/a>” in Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution.\u00a0 They murdered tens of thousands of Jews in the bloody pogroms that were one of their favorite pastimes.\u00a0 The degree to which they were inspired by Christianity should be evident from the image of one of their marches I’ve posted below.\u00a0 No, I’m sorry, but I put little faith in Mr. Prager’s assertion that, while Christianity may have been responsible for inspiring astounding levels of bloody mayhem over the centuries, the Christians promise to be good from now on.<\/p>\n
We are moral beings.\u00a0 We will act morally regardless of whether we believe in imaginary supermen or not, because it is our nature to act morally.\u00a0 As is obvious from the many variations in the details of moral rules among human societies,\u00a0our moralities\u00a0are not rigidly programmed by our genes.\u00a0 Within the limits imposed by our innate moral predispositions, we can shape our moral systems to suit our needs.\u00a0 It seems to me that our efforts in that direction are more likely to be successful if we leave religious fantasies, whether of the spiritual or secular variety, out of the process.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/d\/d6\/Black-hundred1907.jpg\")
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