First, the start of an opinion piece by Leonard Pitts Jr:
I was crammed into a middle seat. The guy in front was practically in my lap, and I had my arms drawn in tightly as I pecked furiously on the keyboard. God glanced over. ”What are you working on?” He asked.
”A column,” I said. “About you, in fact.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Oh? What did I do now?”
”Well, not you per se,” I admitted. ‘It’s about this atheist group, the American Humanist Association. They stirred up folks in Washington, D.C., recently by running a billboard on the buses. It said, `Why believe in a god?’ ”
God points out that atheists are against the restrictions of free speech. Meanwhile, there’s turbulence and God tells this guy to answer the question asked on the billboard. He answers in a pro-god way, obviously, since God’s right there looking at him, and thanks god for a safe flight when they land.
A few days later, this piece by Robert Flagg claims Pitts didn’t do enough to promote how important it is to believe.
Leonard Pitts’ stab at justifying belief (”Why believe in God?” Opinions, Thursday) is a valiant effort. But there is a much simpler answer: Without a belief in God, we have no basis to form moral and ethical judgments, as science and objective reality offer no path to doing so.
I’m really tired of this argument. It’s a logical fallacy. I think people can come up with ideas for decent human behaviour without resorting to an invisible referee. In fact, doesn’t it seem like pretty tenuous position to be in, declaring that the only reason you’re good is because an invisible sky daddy just might be watching?
It’s possible to resist natural urges to get annoyed and violent and argumentative without a belief in a supreme deity. I do it all the time. I figured out for myself that hurting other human beings is not a nice thing to do. Not because I’m afraid I’ll go to hell if I do, but because it’s wrong. It’s just wrong. It doesn’t take a god to figure that out. And here’s a question – who set god’s idea of morality? When you look at how the bible is built, how many deaths God caused in the early books and how the beliefs changed and evolved and grew, it seems apparent to me that people decided for themselves what morality path to follow and gave god the credit. People who didn’t understand the natural scientific order of things – natural disasters are not god’s punishments for sins. People have wanted to believe that because they need to feel like someone’s making sure people do the right thing. People should be able to do the right thing without looking over their shoulder all the time.
Honestly, what scientific principle gives you “the right to life.” Indeed, consider a purely scientific approach to life whereby we use genetic testing to abort all life with genetic mutations: If homosexuality is deemed to be genetic, then we can eliminate homosexuality from society by aborting all babies with the gene. Doesn’t seem right, does it?
But homosexuality doesn’t get in the way of leading a full and healthy life. It’s an ethical minefield to consider letting fetuses with incurable afflictions “go” rather than face the trials and hardships of raising such a child, and affording to raise one that will require years and years of corrective surgery or special equipment. I think it’d be unfortunate if people chose to end their existence rather than try to raise them in spite of whatever it is.
“Quality of life” is a term that gets bandied about. Take the case of Tracy Latimer. She was born with a very severe form of cerebral palsy. She suffered from seizures, was unable to walk or speak and had very limited cognitive ability. Her father, Robert, made a very difficult decision regarding his daughter, ultimately laying her in his pick-up truck, running a hose from the exhaust to the window and starting the ignition.
It was a messy case and I’m certainly not condoning what he did, but I can understand the pain involved in choosing to do it. Arguments have gone back and forth over this case and other situations where the topic of euthanasia is inevitable.
Medical science is a marvel. Consider all the people who are alive today because doctors were able to keep them from dying young. Consider all the diseases cured, all the ailments treated, all the broken bones and heart attacks dealt with by confident professionals. All those second chances.
While I can say I’m pro-choice, I would never fall on the side that promotes designer babies, no matter how pro-science I am. I think that’s a very disturbing concept that wouldn’t do humanity much good at all. Too much tweaking of the gene lines and we’ll be as bad off as Dalmations and Labrador retrievers. Purebreds have far more genetic disorders than a Heinz 57 ever will.
Which reminds me — the SPCA has been running longer than any child protection service and I’ve just thought of a reason why — because livestock costs money to replace and kids are free.
Isn’t that callous? Absolutely, but I think there’s definitely a grain of truth in it. Plus, it would also explain why children were sent to work at such a young age. They’re free to have, but not free to feed so the earlier you could get your kids into the work force, the sooner they’d earn their keep.
What Pitts and Flagg don’t seem to get is that ethics and morality only seem black and white. They’re not and they never have been. They’re very fluid terms depending on where you are and when you’re there and what the influences are. Even now there are still people who think slavery is morally good and justified because the Good Book says so. How can that be supported by anyone today?
The belief in God, and the resulting Scriptures, allows us to define a set of social rules that are above science and the ability of any man to overturn (be it a majority of men or a despot). The strength of belief is belief itself. Proving God exists, just as much as proving God does not exist, destroys religion because you cannot believe in something you know.
Social rules that allow for sacrificing sons and stoning daughters? It’s in the scriptures, so it’s morally correct? Certainly must be for Muslims and don’t bits of the Koran seem like paraphrases from the Old Testament?
The irony, of course, is that atheists themselves are practicing religion. Ask an atheist, “Can you prove God does not exist?” He can’t. He simply “believes” God does not exist. Thus, atheists are engaging in a belief system and, hence, practicing religion.
Only if you redefine what religion is. I’d like to say this logic does not resemble earth logic but too many people think like this to make the statement true.
Sure, atheists lean toward a disbelief in supernatural forces controlling people and the environment. But it’s not just god-belief we don’t follow. We tend to be skeptical of a lot of strange things people have been taken in by. Some of us might even be tempted to compare the religious imprisonment of the mind to a devastating example of Stockholm syndrome, made worse because those under the thrall are so happy to be oppressed by their religion that they joyfully seek to convert and trap others and consider those of us who are free from influence to be worthy of eternal damnation. What kind of sadist would wish and pray for that? No atheists would. We don’t think there is a hell of any kind, save for some people’s lives on earth.
I don’t think atheists have to prove gods don’t exist. We just have to prove it’s possible to explain the world without resorting to superstitious threats and trickery. We just have to show it’s possible to be just and moral and ethical and reasonable without depending on some higher being to show us the way. We can figure it out for ourselves. As a group, I think human beings are smart enough to do that.
