Seeing that the American Humanist Association is, yet again, out to prove that they have way too much money on their hands I will be 1) providing the text of the article by Jeff Jacoby, Where we “Created by God to Be Good”? (Patriot Post, November 15, 2010) and 2) beginning a series considering the ads described therein.
As December approaches Jews, Christians, Muslims, African Americans, Costanzites, etc. are looking forward to celebrating Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Festivus (as per Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza, “A Festivus, for the rest of us”), etc.
Meanwhile, atheists (perhaps suffering from Holy day envy) are making plans to waste great amounts of money (that could be used to help the needy) in order to besmirch God, the Bible, Jesus, “religion,” etc.
It has become an annual tradition: The days grow shorter, the holidays approach, and the American Humanist Association rolls out an ad campaign promoting atheism and disparaging religion…This year, the association is taking a more combative tone. It is spending $200,000 to “directly challenge biblical morality”…
The ads juxtapose violent or otherwise unpleasant passages from the Bible (or the Koran) with “humanist” quotations from prominent atheists. For example, a dreadful prophecy from the Hebrew prophet Hosea — “The people of Samaria … have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open” — is contrasted with Albert Einstein’s comment that he “cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation.”
Of course anyone can cherry-pick quotes to make a point. And of course it is true, as the humanist group’s executive director Roy Speckhardt maintains, that there are “religious texts” that “advocate fear, intolerance, hate, and ignorance.” Religion has often been put to evil purposes or invoked to justify shocking cruelty. Then again, the same is true of every area of human endeavor, from medicine to journalism to philosophy to the law.
But it will take more than a few grim verses plucked out of context to substantiate the core message of the American Humanist Association’s ad campaign: that God and the Judeo-Christian tradition are not necessary for the preservation of moral values and that human reason is a better guide to goodness than Bible-based religion.
Can people be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good? Sure. There have always been kind and ethical nonbelievers. But how many of them reason their way to kindness and ethics, and how many simply reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised?
In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. “We know that you can be good without God,” Speckhardt tells CNN. He can be confident of that only because he lives in a society so steeped in Judeo-Christian values that he takes those values for granted. But a society bereft of that religious heritage is one not even Speckhardt would want to live in.
For in a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees “Thou shalt not murder.” It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone. One might reason instead — as Lenin and Stalin and Mao reasoned — that there is nothing wrong with murdering human beings by the millions if doing so advances the Marxist cause. Or one might reason from observing nature that the way of the world is for the strong to devour the weak — or that natural selection favors the survival of the fittest by any means necessary, including the killing of the less fit.
It may seem obvious to us today that human life is precious and that the weakest among us deserve special protection. Would we think so absent a moral tradition stretching back to Sinai? It seemed obvious in classical antiquity that sickly babies should be killed. “We drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal,” wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger 2,000 years ago, stressing that “it is not anger but reason” that justifies the murder of handicapped children.
Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder definitively evil. Otherwise its wrongfulness is a matter of opinion. Mao and Seneca approved of murder; we disapprove. What makes us think we’re right?
The God who created us created us to be good. Atheists may believe — and spend a small fortune advertising — that we can all be “good without God.” History tells a very different story.
I found two comments particularly telling as they reminded me of a statement made by Richard Dawkins; they are, “a society bereft of that religious heritage is one not even Speckhardt would want to live in” and “It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone.”
Here is Richard Dawkins’ statement when he considered “If somebody used my views to justify a completely self – centred lifestyle, which involved trampling all over other people” he concludes:
I think I would be fairly hard put to it to argue on purely intellectual grounds. I think it would be more:
“This is not a society in which I wish to live. Without having a rational reason for it necessarily, I’m going to do whatever I can to stop you doing this.”
I couldn’t, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious.
I think I could finally only say, “Well, in this society you can’t get away with it’ and call the police.”
Of course, he presupposes that the society/government/police would agree with him. Let him call the Gestapo in order to complain about Nazi mistreatment of Jews…he would be their next target.
At least, he states, “I realise this is very weak, and I’ve said I don’t feel equipped to produce moral arguments.”
See Atheist Bus Ads and Billboards for previous example of the fact that such atheist ads only prove the utter fallacy of the well-within-the-box-atheist-groupthink-talking-points-de-jour of such organizations.
