GREAT breakdown of common smear against non-believers: When I tell people I’m an atheist, the most common (and most exasperating) response I get is: “Well, without God, where do you get your morals from?” Inevitably they will tell me that I cannot have an objective framework for morality if I don’t believe in spirits and afterlives (which is rubbish), but the irony is that between the two of us, my challenger is actually the one who cannot categorically condemn any moral choice we could make. John Piper will tell you in a heartbeat that killing your child is totally legit if God tells you to do it, because the Bible tells him so. In the end, if whatever God tells you to do is right, then morality is fundamentally relative. Once you’ve decided on that way of thinking, it inevitably devolves into a theological debate about God’s feelings. This is a highly subjective discussion, of course, since one of the key tenets of monotheism is that if there is a God, you’re probably not him. So how is it that you feel qualified to determine what he wants and what he doesn’t (and for that matter, why it has to be a “he”)? It’s your word against another man’s word, not God’s word against everyone else’s. You can try saying “but the Bible says,” except that’s really the word of more people just like you. Any attempt to deny this leads to untenable absurdity because the Bible isn’t even consistent with itself. Biblical writers didn’t all see everything the same way. patheos/blogs/godlessindixie/2014/10/21/evangelicalism-messaging-problem/
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:54:01 +0000
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