The Godless Delusion is a powerful book. After reading it, I realized how much I didn’t know about atheism. I realized how lacking atheism is as a worldview, especially in the area of morality.

“After reading it, I realized how much I didn’t know about atheism.”
 
I haven’t read this book (I’ll do my best to get my hands on a copy eventually), but I think it’s safe to say that you shouldn’t learn about atheism from a book written by Catholics. You wouldn’t want atheists to teach other atheists about Catholicism, would you? If you haven’t already, find some atheist literature and learn about atheism from that. Secondhand information is always bound to be at least a little distorted!

There is something inherent in saying, “I’m an atheist” that implies, “You are mistaken to be a believer.” Even if you’re not saying it explicitly. Even if you couldn’t care less about persuading people out of religion. Even if you’re actively opposed to the idea of persuading people out of religion. There is no way to say, “I don’t believe in God,” without implying, “If you do believe in God, you’re wrong.”
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Viewed in this manner, the most neutral atheist billboard you could imagine (e.g., one that said nothing more than “atheists exist”) communicates that religious believers are wrong. Wearing a t-shirt with a pro-atheist message becomes a confrontational act of sorts.
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A Christian wearing a t-shirt with a pro-Christian message is communicating that everyone else is wrong too. This sort of message is no less confrontational, but it has the advantage of being the majority position in the U.S. (i.e., Christian privilege).
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Nobody particularly enjoys being told that they are wrong, especially when deeply held convictions are at stake. It is reasonable to expect that this sort of communication will impact relations between atheists and the religious.

The shocking conclusion, then, is that, regardless of whether you are a kind humanitarian atheist or Joseph Stalin, neither one is objectively right or wrong.
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You Catholics must be exhausted from all your jumping to conclusions.

Scot,

Kind humanitarian/Stalin…so, are you saying that one is wrong?  Which one?  And that one is right?  Which one?  Why?  How do you know?  Are they right for you or are they objectively “right”?  What is meant by “Kind Humanitarian”?  Who defines “Kind”?  If you’re saying that Stalin was “wrong”, then tell us why he was wrong.  Was he “objectively wrong” or is it that you think he was wrong?

It’s very possible that we have jumped to conclusions. So clear up the misunderstanding.  How do we know right from wrong if they aren’t Objective?  If it’s cultural, then it isn’t objective.  If it isn’t objective, then it is subjective.  If it is subjective, then we can have differing opinions and perhaps Stalin isn’t really “wrong” at all, except in some peoples eyes.  If it is Objective then who/what is the authority of that objectivity.

I don’t think that wanting there to be objective morality is helpful in trying to prove the existence of God. If one could prove there was objective morality then it might be helpful, because you could propose a God as the source. But clearly there is not objective morality. For example, some cultures find killing in war, infanticide, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, hunting for sport and suicide bombings, or some selection of these, to be moral. At the extreme opposite end, you find Jainist monks and nuns sweeping the ground in front of them as they walk to avoid stepping on insects and inadvertently killing them.

Most people are born with hard-wired drives to empathize with, protect and aid the members of the community they are born into. We see the same behavior in elephants, dolphins, primates and canines. One’s upbringing and the values of the surrounding culture form the rest of one’s sense of morality. This complex set of factors results in different ideas of what is moral among humans. It is our greatest struggle to reconcile these differences, and agree on what behavior in others should be encouraged, tolerated or forcibly prevented.

It is normal to think that one’s own moral standards are objectively right, but they cannot be proven so. Interestingly, the atheist Sam Harris believes that an objective morality can be derived from rational principles. I think he is wrong, because morality is based on values, and there is no way to derive one’s values from reason.

If Stalin or Mao had had a belief in God and a correspondingly religious sense of morality, they might not have been genocidal tyrants. But that doesn’t make belief in God true—it merely means that the belief might have changed their behavior in a way most of us would prefer. The question of what effect religious belief has on moral behavior is a whole different question than whether that religious belief is objectively true.

Cowalker, you write:

“and there is no way to derive one’s values from reason.”

Where ELSE are we to derive them from?  My values (as well as my faith) come directly from the most rigid application of reason I can muster, aided by the deep considerations of others.  It matters not what I feel, or what the society around me thinks, if such value-bases do not stand to reason.  To claim that values are a type of knee-jerk reaction is to “devalue” values.  Another dangerous atheist idea.

Furthermore your social categorization of morality reeks of extremes.  That being said, you are correct in suggesting that morality (MAY) be derived from social tradition or shared sincerity.  This is, of course, where Christian morality differs: it is based on set objective ideas (values) which cannot be countermanded by even the strongest social pressure or most sincere individual divergence.  “Thou shalt not kill” is a command, not a social opinion.

It also matters _nothing_ if societies or sub-cultures (such as the nuns you mention) have strange or extremely divergent opinions on morality; they would be nothing more than another in a long line of misguided pagan cultures.  This is why Christ came: to set the record straight.  It is some folks fight so vigorously for the right to live in self-imposed moral confusion, when the answer to our checkered past and hazy present is painfully simple.

Finally, in claiming that there “is no objective morality” you must also claim that there is no objective truth, which is the same as saying that “it is objectively true that there is no objective truth,” a clear contradiction.

Of course I may have misunderstood you, as you may have just meant that it is senseless to believe in anything at all; at which point I would be forced to conclude that your post is a self-contradiction in itself.

Nobody is a moral relativist when it’s their own ox being gored.  An atheist coworker of mine used to assert that right and wrong are subjective and personal, but as soon as someone mistreated her or someone she cared about, she would say “That’s wrong!” no ifs ands or buts.  There is something hard-wired in us that tells us that some things are right or wrong, and mere abstract theorizing can’t silence it. 

It’s been said that reality is that which refuses to go away when we stop believing in it.

Mark: “This is why Christ came: to set the record straight. It is some folks fight so vigorously for the right to live in self-imposed moral confusion, when the answer to our checkered past and hazy present is painfully simple.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill’ is a command, not a social opinion.”
That command has been hedged around with exceptions which make it very complicated.

Christian morality allows many of the behaviors I listed in my post above—killing in war, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and hunting animals for sport. There are many Christians who believe one or more of these behaviors are moral. But Christians don’t agree amongst themselves on which ones are acceptable.  If Jesus’ teachings were the the final word in morality, they could not be interpreted in so many different ways. Christians explain this by saying that THEIR particular interpretation is objectively true. What is an atheist meant to think of this? It seems to me that throughout history Christian morality has developed and diverged in different directions in reaction to cultural pressures, just as it has itself exerted pressure on the culture. It is never simple.

For example, in the brutal circumstances of the medieval Europe, carefully reasoned theology justified the Church condemning heretics to be burned alive. Today the pope attends ecumenical peace conferences. Did reason itself change in the meantime? No, the values of the culture changed from supporting the Church in its mission to save souls above all, to supporting the individual’s freedom to find his own salvation—or not. Over hundreds of years the Church’s privilege to use government resources to enforce homogeneity of belief was reduced to the point where Western government is secular, and the Church has no choice but to coexist with competing faiths. The Church did not reason its way outside the box of the surrounding culture, which had no problem with torture and grisly criminal penalties meant to strike terror into potential lawbreakers. And it never did reason its way out of this behavior. In each place and at each step, the Church had to be forced to relinquish a power of the Inquisition. It never took the initiative and said “theological reasoning has led us to conclude that it is wrong to use civil penalties to enforce Church doctrine.”

And how was reason used to derive and prioritize the two values of salvation and intellectual freedom? It was not. From Greek times religion and government were assumed to be inextricably linked. It was believed that rejection of the state religion amounted to treason. That is why Christians were martyred by the Romans. When the ruler Constantine converted to Christianity he promptly began trying to suppress pagan religions. Putting a higher value on intellectual freedom than salvation developed out of myriad changes—growth of a middle-class that could read and write, more contact with different cultures, schisms with Catholicism that succeeded in dominating whole countries, and rediscovery of the Greek and Roman cultures—to name a few.

There is a consensus among Christians that Jesus said to help the poor and oppressed, but look at the wide disagreement among them on how to treat illegal immigrants and whether government should play a role in providing a social safety net. Atheists don’t need Jesus to tell them that society works better for everyone if everyone has the opportunity to participate in a satisfactory role. The devil is in the details, so to speak, as our values conflict over how to achieve this. Is it better to risk enabling freeloaders or better to risk truly deserving people not receiving help? Should food be provided only to poor families where the parents are drug-free?  Is affirmative action just or not? Is it OK to tax the well-off to help the poor because some people have just been luckier than others or do we risk undermining self-discipline and self-reliance by doing so? You can see that Christians interpret that “simple” command from Christ in thousands of different ways. To me, that is not an example of objective morality, and it is certainly not exclusive to Christianity. It is much more like a combination of the hard-wired drive to help the members of the community we are born into, empathy, and our experiences in life.

Kevin: “There is something hard-wired in us that tells us that some things are right or wrong, and mere abstract theorizing can’t silence it.” 

Quoting myself from above: “Christian morality allows many of the behaviors I listed in my post above—killing in war, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and hunting animals for sport. There are many Christians who believe one or more of these behaviors are moral. But Christians don’t agree amongst themselves on which ones are acceptable.”

If simple moral judgments are hard-wired into us, how do you account for these differences? It gets even tougher when you include belief-systems outside of Christianity. We are born with the instincts of pack animals, and if we are normal and lucky we learn to empathize with humans outside of our inner circle. When you factor in cultural differences and personal experiences, it becomes easy to see why we end up with different ideas of right and wrong, even though we share traits of empathy and altruism that have improved the odds of human survival over millenia. It works best for most humans to live in a cooperative community. We have to reach some kind of consensus on values and morality based on these values in order to live together successfully. Naturally consensus values change as the culture changes, and consensus morality changes in response.

My neighbour goes out of his way to cause the passers-by trouble.  But when the passers-by react, he comes running to us for help… 
I notice the picture in your article which reminds me of something I have written a while ago about the atheist who is stripping the branch he’s sitting on because the part responsible for objective reasoning is missing from his brain.