Christians are better than atheists, so there

A Christian Apologist makes his feelings about atheists clear.

Part 1

"Even if one may recognize "right", based on our primitive DNA morality, there is no imperative to actually act that way without a fixed 'Higher Moral Frame of Reference' to motivate and inspire one to do so! You are left with the problem of motivation, inspiration, and even definition of "morality." Jesus defined such, made it part of the Christian imperative, and by His life and example motivated others to do likewise. Atheism offers nothing of the sort. In spite of a given atheist's moral choices--which may be exemplary from a Christian standard--there is no standard in atheism by which to logically define such as exemplary, nor a reason or motivation for other atheists to adhere to those standards or even claim them. There is no basis for a common cooperative moral perspective among atheists whatsoever. That is the Achilles Heel of atheism and the reason why atheist societies have failed."

Wow. So many misunderstandings in one paragraph.  I should try and help...

Dear Evangelical Christian.

Your refutation of the concept of "primitive DNA morality", and your suggestion that DNA morality is perhaps the closest thing to "universal" morality, are both fallacious straw men, because no one claims morality comes exclusively or in any way universally from DNA. The explanation for morality isn't a choice of God vs DNA. What you call “DNA morality” is only a small part of the picture. Human morality is also a product of natural selection and our capacity for learning, rationalisation, and sharing & recording knowledge over hundreds of thousands of years. More detail here  

Your ideas about moral relativism depend on your own (unclear) definition of moral relativism, and the fallacious equivocation of moral relativity with atheism ignores your own moral relativity and the moral relativity of Christians as a whole, and more importantly, the moral relativism of the human race as a whole. Moral relativity is a whole new subject which merits its own standard response described here

Your reference to "atheist societies" is based on more fallacies, perhaps as a way to mask the brutality of your own religion, ignoring the atrocities of the Inquisitions, Crusades and other faith-based misanthropes. Your ridiculous assertions that the French and Russian revolutions were both atheistic and democratic have been dealt with separately here and here. But what of the three bogeymen who regularly appear in Evangelical, anti-atheist propaganda - Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot?

Hitler was a Christian who exploited the inherent anti-Semitism of Christianity.  Hitler's soldiers all wore the slogan, ‘Gott Mit Uns’ (God with us) on their belts and his birthday was “celebrated from the pulpits until his death.” It's hard to imagine how Hitler (or any one) could have turned the Christian population of Germany so spectacularly against the Jews without those religious foundations. 

Stalin: raised as a Christian, attended seminary school and opted to study for the priesthood. We can only speculate how that education inspired him.   He then walked into a ready-made religious tyranny constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church.  

 "The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader.  After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity."   

Stalin tapped into a “reservoir of religious credulity” which had been used to subdue the Soviet population for hundreds of years beneath the yoke of an equally brutal supernatural religion.  The new Tsar, Stalin, used this to send countless innocent Russians to their deaths. It's hard to imagine how Stalin could have even begun to achieve these horrors without Russia's religious legacy. 

Pol Pot: Ten years at Catholic school (there's a pattern emerging here!) and another ten studying at a Buddhist institution. He was a Buddhist and his violence was rooted in a megalomaniacal belief that heaven (or destiny) was guiding him to improve the lives of those he could coerce to share his delusions. 

 "Pol Pot’s line of thinking about revolutionary consciousness directly parallels Buddhist thought, with the “Party line” and “collective stand” being substituted for dhamma…One could certainly push this argument further, contending that the Khmer Rouge attempted to assume the monk’s traditional role as moral instructor (teaching their new brand of “mindfulness”) and that DK regime’s glorification of asceticism, detachment, the elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes), and purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes… "

 And now, dear Apologist, let me play devil's Advocate. Let us suppose you are correct, and atheist tyrants are worse than Christian ones.  We could interpret this to show that the more people believe in the Christian god, the more virtuous they will behave (and yes I know the facts of history contradict this assumption).  So what does this say about an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly beneficent, merciful and all-loving god who allows tyrants (both theist and atheist) to murder millions of helpless children? Who turns a blind eye to the wrongful imprisonment of innocent people. Who starves the poor and the meek? We find ourselves back at the Problem of Evil as stated by Epicurus. 

There's a lot more to be said about the facilitating role of religion in what are wrongly referred to as "atheistic societies" and perhaps the most concise discourse on that subject can be found here.

So what of your other fallacies? Suffice to say, your suggestion that some cultures behaved (or behave) in ways that are “morally repugnant to those of us with a Western perspective” works both ways. Many people find practices of a “Western perspective” to be morally repugnant too. The reason for this is that morality evolves over time and morality is relative. 

You say the Bible motivates and inspires you, maybe it does, but it's obvious not everyone needs the Bible to achieve the same morality and inspiration as you and as we've seen above, some of the greatest tyrants in history were also inspired by the "good book". 

You say “Biblical morality is inspirational and offers an actual imperative to behave morally” and maybe it can do for some people. But it is a fact that many people have used the Bible to justify atrocities, so there's a contradiction there. If we assume that people are the source of human morality, and whatever people read, or experience, or are taught, can be inspirational, then the contradiction disappears. So it's obviously not The Bible or religion that's defining morality.  Scripture is obviously not higher, or moral, or a frame of reference. 

You say Jesus defined morality and offered insights into morality that are counter intuitive and counter cultural, such as loving one's enemies; looking beyond one's status; not favouring or glorifying the rich, powerful nor publicly pious; and so on. First of all, that demonstrates cherry picking of the Bible which ignores the atrocities committed by God and commanded by God. Secondly, it is factually incorrect because (assuming He existed and/or said what He is alleged to have said) Jesus wasn't the first person to espouse those moral messages so he didn't define them at all. Obviously, they are good messages regardless of whether we attribute their origin to Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, Humanism or whatever, so if Christians recognise the sense in those messages along with everyone else, that's reassuring and clearly demonstrates the fact of common values. 

You say atheism offers nothing regarding morality. True. It is also true that a-fairyism and a-elfism  also offer nothing regarding morality. Your morality doesn't come from not believing in something. And neither does mine. Atheism offers no standards. Atheism makes no offers at all. Atheism is not an ideology.  It is not a religion by definition. An atheist's morality doesn't come from atheism and a theist's morality doesn't come from theism. But it is a fact that atheists display the same moral behaviour as Christians (both good and bad), therefore belief in God or Jesus or Vishnu or Zeus cannot be the source of human morality. There must be another source which accounts for the moral behaviour of homo sapiens (and indeed many other species). 

You say there's no basis for an atheist's moral perspective but there obviously is, otherwise atheists wouldn't have a moral perspective. It is a fact that the vast majority of human beings have the same moral perspective, and make the same moral choices, regardless of their religious belief. So again, religious belief cannot be the explanation for morality. The problem with a supernatural explanation for morality is that it is unfalsifiable and relies on the existence of entities that many people consider to be imaginary. A natural explanation for morality is far more powerful because it is universal, verifiable and practical.

Your examples of “failed societies” are always dictatorships. You cherry pick examples of dictatorships that were anti-theist to support your argument but you totally ignore the hundreds of examples of Christian societies that killed and oppressed millions of people in the name of Christianity. For example, you repeatedly refer to the “Reign of Terror” in France but ignore the reigns of terror sponsored by Christian powers. Here is a partial list  

You also try to claim the moral high ground for Christianity by suggesting that it was Christians who reformed the evil committed in the name of Christianity. This is rather like awarding me a medal because I've stopped punching you in the face! The fact is that the terror, slavery, oppression, discrimination and bullying committed in the name of Christianity was reformed by democracy. And the same acts committed by non-Christian societies has also – and will be – reformed by democracy. 

Your cherry picking of history, such as referencing “the track record of atheism” whilst ignoring the "track record" of Christianity, and also falsely equivocating atheism with anti-theism, and also falsely assuming atheism is a religion or ideology, and also falsely assuming atrocities were committed in the name of atheism, makes your argument a house of fallacies built on a foundation of fallacies! And by the same token - if anyone blames Christianity for atrocities they are also fallaciously cherry picking. It's true that if we draw up a list of atrocities committed by Christian led dictatorships in one column and atheist led dictatorships in the next column, the Christian list is hundreds of times longer, but I still maintain those Christian societies didn't commit atrocities because they were Christian but because they were dictatorships. You can't blame theism, you can't blame atheism. You can blame dictators.

Part 2 - The Personal Touch!

This time, our Christian friend makes it more personal! It seems that Christians are nor not just morally superior, they are also superior when it comes to solving problems...

"Overall we have a much greater motivation to solve the world's problems--and all other problems--than you do!"

Really? Well, ironically, far from solving problems, the Apologist has introduced several problems into just one sentence!

The first problem here is the factual inaccuracy. For just one example, consider the Christians who don't even consider climate change to be a problem in the first place.  And there are thousands of similar examples throughout history.

The second problem is the "motivation" which according to the Apologist is based on statements attributed to God in the bible. That is a very unsound basis for motivation because God might not exist. It also demonstrates a lack of understanding of what motivation is, i.e. a mixture of understanding the consequences of actions (nurture) and emotions/instincts (nature).  If the Apologist is using supernatural consequences as his motivation, then again this is a very weak foundation because those supernatural entities might not exist and the supernatural consequences are unfalsifiable.

If someone requires motivating to do a good thing, then explanations based on reason and logic will always be more robust than supernatural reasons. That doesn't mean supernatural motivations don't work - of course they can as per the Father Christmas principle. 

 

This raised another question - why do some people - and specifically Christians in this case - require an external motivation in order to be good? Perhaps that is an important aspect of religion - to teach people how to be good who would otherwise not understand the difference between good and bad.

The third problem is the inherent arrogance. Let's remind ourselves of the definition of arrogant...

having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities.

Now of course, not all Christians (or Muslims) display this exaggerated sense of their own abilities, but it is a risk. I suspect this attitude is what causes some people to turn away from Christianity and Islam so it's counter-productive.

Why is it counter-productive? Well it's all very well for a Christians and Muslims to claim that God and Angels and demons and prophets and whatnot said this or did that, because those things are unfalsifiable. But when a Christian or Muslim makes claims about people's lives, behaviour and experiences which are wrong, not only might those people feel insulted, those people also know for a fact, from their own experience, that those claims are wrong. So they might think to themselves that if an Apologist can be so wrong about something as obvious and fact based as that, perhaps they are wrong about many other things too.