The Alien Rape Voyeurs:
Now we get to the aliens and rape portion of Dan Barker’s statements. Atheists have some very strange ideas about rape, at least the New Atheist such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
At 54:54 into part 2 the formal debate has ended and questions are being taken from the audience. Dan Barker was asked:
You stated that there are no actions that are absolutely wrong, such as lying, etc., that there is always an exception. When then is rape considered okay? What is the exception to this action?
Dan Barker begins his response by quoting the Bible. So as to not digress too much I have written a separate essay which, amongst other things, responds to some of his references to the Bible, please see Dan Barker – Scriptural Misinterpretations and Misapplications.
Dan Barker positively affirming God’s non-existence and affirming absolute materialism, see here and here
You may recall that Dan Barker claimed that morals are not absolute because “I can think of an exception in any case.” At 56:25 into part 2 he offers his exception to rape being absolutely immoral:
Here’s a hypothetical. And I just said it’s hypothetical. Suppose th- you, you know how ah, you know how some species like cats they like to play with mice before they kill them. I mean they have this weird thing about exaggerating the harm before they eat their meal.
Suppose there was some advanced, powerful species outside of our solar system that came to earth and it was like that. And it was torturing people. And raping women. And this, and we thought how horrible, this is really bad. And suppose this culture just for the fun of it said, “We’re gonna kill the whole species. We’re gonna kill all of you. We’re gonna show how powerful we are.”
We think, “Boy, what an amoral group” right? We’d be afraid of them. But what if they said to you ah, “Before we kill everybody off ah, we just wanna have a little more fun here, if you will rape a woman, then we will let the rest of the species go, okay? We’ll let every, we’ll just leave. If you’ll just do that one thing, and let us watch, because we’re sickos, right? Then we will, we’ll sa-, we’ll save the rest of the planet.”
Now, I know that’s not likely to happen but hypothetically something like that could happen. Nature is weird, right?
In that weird case, which we, you and I would never see in our life time, you can make an argument that although it wouldn’t be pleasant, and you wouldn’t like it, and you’d would feel really bad about yourself, you would consider that to be the moral choice.
At 58:55 into part 2, just after having stated the above, Dan Barker asks the man who posed the question about rape, “Let me ask you, would you do it?” The man responds, “No.”
To which Dan Barker responds, “You wouldn’t do it, you would kill all of us?” The man responds, “I would be ethical and those aliens would be unethical and that’s too bad for them.” To which Dan Barker further states, “And you would kill all of us and your children, that’s highly unethical. You would have a chance to save the human race and you would blow that chance.”
A few things to mention here: I am quite sure that there are many highly qualified thinkers that could do a thorough job of rationally dissecting Dan Barker’s comment about aliens and rape. However, I think that if he had asked me whether I would commit the rape I would respond thusly (you have to imaging it: I would be slack jawed with my eyes as wide open as I could get them):
“Uuuuuuummmmmmmmm, yeeeeaaaaah, I’m gonna base my ethics upon the real world and leave you to you sci-fi contemplations of alien rape voyeurs. Rape has always been, is now, and will always be absolutely immoral!”
Please forgive me, I am not certain that any more than that needs to be stated. Imagine actually sitting around spending your time thinking up ways of claiming that rape is moral. I do not know what it is about New Atheist’s fascination with rape but even more so with aliens.