Is Atheism a threat to Freedom

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I've gotten a little fed up of late with all the bash Christian threads especially after they tried to dismiss the criticisms of Atheism.

Belief in God extends to the belief that our rights come from God and not from Government. If there is no God then our rights come from Government and that means Government can arbitrarily take our rights away whenever they feel like it and we have no right to protest it. Fact is, it is our belief in God that led to the American Revolution. The belief in God that led to to the Underground Railroad and Abraham Lincoln's beliefs that slavery was morally wrong. If was Martin Luther King Jr.'s belief in God that drove him to lead the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. If they hadn't believed in God, then they would never have been driven to lead the fight for human rights.

Without the belief's in God all morality is relative and really anything goes. Whomever has the gold makes the rules. It is the belief in God that leads people to believe that human life has value and Government doesn't have the right to do whatever it wants.

Not so. Our morality has to be consistent with out biological nature. Determining that is a scientific problem and we need not invoke God or the Devil to study how our biology conditions moral judgment.

Since science is not based on the a priori or the absolutely true, a view of morality linked to our biological make up is not certain, but it is not relativistic either. Science is ultimately based on fact.

Some morality is fatal to humans. Other morality is consistent with human life and even human flourishing. We don't need God to search in that direction.

ruveyn

oh those damnable atheists. always oppressing religious people!

not letting them build churches, burning their holy books, going to war over our (lack of) beliefs...

With that argument slavery is acceptable because the smarter people should control the less intelligent for their own good...

Heck I could argue that through atheism, it would be okay to sterilize everyone on the spectrum, and abort all children on the spectrum, because they are bad for the gene pool. Sometimes what is good for the species isn't pretty.

If you believe in God, that would not be acceptible because it would be considered out and out murder.

@ waltur

I ended up writing this thread to make the point people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones as well as the fact that there are moral issues to consider.

Puhleeze. I know people who believe in God and who do not believe the zygotes are persons with rights. I know God fearing folks who believe in the racial supremacy of whites over blacks. I knew Orthodox Jews who believe that Jews have an extra "soul" which gentiles to not have.

Belief in God is no guarantee of right thought or good behavior.

There were several Muslim True Believers who crashed two planes into the WTC on 9/11/2001. They surely believed in God. A fat lot of good that did for the passengers or the people in the twin towers.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 11 Nov 2010, 8:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

balls of allah! belief in god prevents murder? since when?

i'm sorry, did i hallucinate the old testament? i've got good weed, but it's not that good.

which god do you believe in? what brand of christianity is on your label? some of you guys think things that are crazy even by theist standards.

slavery? killing children for being impure? those are DEFINITELY (read as: not at all) the pillars of "not believing in magic."

I didn't say he necessarily prevents murder just there are consequences for murder because it is morally wrong.



I'm a Methodist actually.



Would an average Christian think slavery or killing children for having a disability is okay? I'm not saying there aren't a few wingnuts out there, but in general.

The point I was trying to make though centered on moral relativism and our rights at least as they are stated in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

i live in an apartment. houses this close to disneyland are way too expensive, glass or not.

take a moment, here. i want you to realize that you're trying to take apart atheism as a christian. if you want to keep trying to do that, by all means, i love to watch ppr's atheist minds at work. but look at how AG is targeting christianity in the two threads he's recently made for that. he does so from the christian perspective.

imagine, for a moment, the atheist's perspective. we believe that your religion is a social construct. we believe that humans invented god. to propose, to us, that our moral values are based on god is to say that our moral values are based on a social construct constructed by humans. we don't believe in magic. we believe that all of those "christian" ideals you hold were thought up by humans.

really think about that for a minute..

while you're doing that, i'd like to endorse AwesomelyGlorious as WrongPlanet.net's most strident atheist! as that is surely where this is going to end up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_slavery

edit: so your the ones with the flaming cross as your symbol, right?

I'd say Christianity is a much greater threat to freedom, as it requires a falsified essentialist theory of rights. Once it becomes obvious to people that that theory of rights is antiquated, there will no longer be a secure foundation for rights in the minds of people like the OP. So Christianity unnecessarily prevents human rights from being tethered to the much more secure foundation of "things that, if ruled into existence, leads to human flourishing" by keeping them tethered to the collapsing foundation of "things that are magically written in stone by a Cosmic Santa Claus".

Thus, Christianity in general, and this poster in particular, are a much greater threat to human rights than atheism.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 11 Nov 2010, 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Now don't be nasty. Some Christians take their religion and their morality quite seriously.

I, on the other hand, regard arguments about morality as primate chatter from the Monkey House.

I believe in preferences, not morality.

I believe in possession, not property.

I am a close follower of David Hume who made a distinction between what is actually observed and what we think about what we observe.

ruveyn

Ah ha. I wondered what the symbol was.

The reminds me of the time when the Unitarians burned a Question Mark on my lawn because criticized them publicly. (no, no no, I am just kidding!)

ruveyn

you just made my day, old man. thanks for that.

The government is made and owned by the people, people indirectly make the rules. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution (the user manual)

If people don't take the responsibilities to maintain the government fit and efficient, it's because people have either become lazy, passive or ignorant.


In fact, Gods come with more rules than rights (that means less freedoms)


Don't mix God with anything else (science, politics...) or you'll be eaten alive on any forum. God is about faith, period.

The problem is that the theological texts don't support the view of rights. In fact, given the nature of governance for the past few thousand years, attributing rights to theological texts is anachronistic, as modern society was really the one to promote rights, and this emerged from the Enlightenment, and (ironically enough) was popularized by heretics, rather than by people reading those texts in a conventional way, and within the line from which liberalism is descended, there is a LOT of anti-clericalism as well, such as with Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and very little corresponding theological conservatism.

Even further, a point I've tried hammering in on this forum countless times is that the Christian text doesn't support Christian rights, or anything similar. The text tolerates slavery, and it urged people to accept the Roman government, a government that was actively persecuting these individuals. As such, the text does not support your claims about the American Revolution at all. It doesn't really seem to force us to anti-slavery conclusions either.

Finally, a belief in God isn't necessary for a belief in freedom, and an agitation for that, and many of the more adamant libertarians(who promote most rights, period) of the last century have been agnostics or atheists. And note: libertarianism tends to push very hard that government doesn't really have the authority to do whatever it wants, so this point that many of the major libertarian thinkers of the last century is really a big one, especially given how indebted conservatives are to these libertarians.

I think most people tend to think human life has value at a basic level anyway, so I don't see how God is relevant here.

Inuyasha, basically here's how I interpret your entire argument:
Some ENTIRELY MADE UP theism supports modern society.
I like that.
Therefore the opposite, atheism, is wrong.

The issue is that the theism you actually push back to is ENTIRELY MADE UP, not derived from history or the texts, but rather a cultural invention. As such, its ontology really can't support anything. Even further, it makes most of the points quite irrelevant given that it is made up. Now, we can argue about it being made-up, but history supports that it is made up, as do the words of the texts. So... if you are allowed to be theologically dishonest, why should atheists even accept your point? A dishonest atheism could reject any argument against it outright anyway.