We now conclude considering the propaganda written for and by the New York City atheist ad campaign, by Austin Dacey and Michael De Dora, Jr. (spokesperson for the New York City campaign) via the platform of Psychology Today.
The context—historical and grammatical—of the Ten Commandments is that of giving a constitution to a brand new nation that was being built up from the ground up (I detailed this point here). The commandments deal with issues of ethics: its premise and its practice. Thus, they are to be applied to ethically questionable situations in ethical ways. For example, lying to save someone’s life would be ethical as it is protecting a life. This is because in such a case one is not lying in order to deceived someone in order to get away with something is unethical; for self-serving, selfish, petty, purposes. Stealing to feed your family in a dire situation would be ethical while otherwise stealing would be unethical (or, some may state that in some cases, such as stealing to feed a starving family, one must do certain things even though they are unethical).
To the issue of the one-week old embryos; note that many people, such as Dacey, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Barker etc. always argue in favor of abortion by appealing to a mere clump of cells (which is what we all are in a God-free universe) whilst disregarding the fact of abortions which take place at every single stage of development.
Dan Barker (see Dan Barker’s Views On Human Dignity),
a fetus that’s the size of a thumb that has, what, what would you put it in a little locket and hang it around your neck?
Sam Harris,
A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all.[1]
Richard Dawkins:
Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.)…if late-aborted embryos with nervous systems suffer – though all suffering is deplorable – it is not because they are human that they suffer. There is no general reason to suppose that human embryos at any stage suffer more than cow or sheep embryos at the same developmental stage.[2]
Remember “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”?[3] Well, a cow is a sheep is a fly is a human baby. Incidentally, the feeling of pain as an arbiter of when abortion is or is not ethical is an arbitrary assertion; if we could anesthetize somebody’s body completely could we then proceed to murder them? In fact, abortion is none-but the brutal and yes, sometimes painful murder of beautiful, healthy, innocent and defenseless human babies—inhuman, subhuman brutality is committed in dismembering the bodies of babies.
At this point I should perhaps state that I am 100% pro-choice in that I believe that every woman has the right to choose whether or not to get pregnant. Once she is pregnant we deal with ethical issues. For example, in the case of the mother’s life being in jeopardy it is ethical to have an abortion because the alternative is standing by, doing nothing and watching two people die instead of doing something to at least save one life. But what is the point of abortion? Since life begins at conception (when the sperm fertilized the egg) the person getting the abortion does not want what they know to be a human being to exist any longer, they do not want them to live, they do not want to have to deal with them, and so they take action to rid themselves of this bothersome person.
They dehumanizing them as “zygote,” “embryo,” “conceptus,” “by-product of conception,” etc. Terms which no woman who is looking forward to the birth of her baby would use, “Oh, my by-product of conception just kicked!” This is why it is murder at any stage of development; it is keeping a human being from developing from a fertilized egg into a person who argues in favor of brutalizing babies as long as they are a few inches on the inside of a woman.
Austin Dacey continues,
It cannot tell us why we should follow it, rather than some other set. Of course, it would be no help to add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Follow Commandments since the same question would arise about that commandment
Here he is admitting the ultimate metaphysical or transcendental foundation for all and any ethical system and he is missing the point that the regress is actually finite and ends at the foot of the Triune God. This is the case within the context of the Decalogue as well as logically (as I demonstrated with regards to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorns, et al.) and it is why it does indeed, tell us why we should follow it, rather than some other set.
Note, again, that since the Decalogue is the, as it were, founding document of the nation of Israel it provides the premise of, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3). God liberated the Israelites form the four centuries of slavery—Egyptian slavery, which atheists never condemn—and defeated the gods of Egypt; this is why He is qualified to guide them.
Dacey further states,
We are the ones who must discern whether it is a voice to be trusted…[and] decide which of these voices made the most sense. Moral thinking is like that. No one else can do it for you.
This is another false dichotomy which juxtaposes ethical imperatives such as the Decalogue, on the one hand, and discerning, deciding, thinking, on the other.
Whence did he get the idea that never the twain shall meet? They were meant to meet, they were supposed to meet and they have met. Considering life and logic as we know it, God could not make a statement that was not filtered through human reason since the manner in which we are designed makes it so that all information, from the conceptual to the sensual, is filtered through our minds and brains and are therefore subject to human reason. Moreover, God is the very one who urges us thusly, “let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).
Austin Dacey notes:
Sometimes it is said that human life is valuable because we are made in the image of God. But we have no idea what the image of God looks like, except as reflected in the things we find valuable in human beings, like imagination or self-awareness. It is not that we find life to have worth because we believe we are made in the image of God, but rather that we believe we are made in the image of God because we find life to have worth.
Note the disconnect: Sometimes it is said that human life is valuable because we are made in the image of God but we have no idea what the image of God looks like except that we do as reflected in the things we find valuable in human beings, like imagination or self-awareness. This is a non sequitur as we do not need to know what the image of looks like in order to claim that human life is valuable because we are made in that image. By this reasoning we could not claim that life has worth, as Dacey claimed, since we do not know what “worth” looks like except ____________ (fill in the blank). The last sentence is merely a presuppositional atheist assertion.
Dacey does make one positive point even whilst offering a however, however:
No one can ignore the importance of Judeo-Christian values to the history of Western cultures, and no one can deny that faith is a source of virtue for many people. However, in the evolution of humanity, religion arose after the capacity for reason and empathy–the conscience. And in determining which values are best, we have no alternative but to rely on conscience.
As per above, we epistemically agree on the administering function of the conscience whilst disagreeing about the ontology premise upon which it functions; his being “evolution” and mine being theism.
Lastly, having done what he thinks is discrediting the Judeo-Christian ethic Austin Dacey declares “the secular message”,
This is the secular message: Ethics comes from below, not above. It is a message that reaches out to believers as well as atheists–and anyone else who might be riding the subway.
My conclusion is that ethics comes from above and is administered from below and that this God authored and given ethos is a message that reaches out to believers as well as atheists. God leaves no one unguided and un-provided for: He gives all of us His ethos in our very beings and our conscience whereby to administer it; “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).
[1] Sam Harris, “A Dissent: The Case Against Faith – Religion does untold damage to our politics. An atheist’s lament,” MSNBC / Newsweek, Nov. 13, 2006
[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), pp. 293, 297
[3] Ingrid Newkirk, (President, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-PETA) Vogue, September, 1989