Radical Atheist

Lot’s of people have what you and I would probably agree are screwed up moral codes. Humans are imperfect. To touch on the old Hitler “was an atheist” chestnut, he was raised with strict religious (Catholic) morals. Somewhere along the line he took what he believed and twisted it into a perverse belief system. A person who acts “immorally” is by definition not acting out of a belief in any moral code, theistic or atheistic. They’re acting without morals of any kind.

People behave immorally (according to so-called Christian morals). Are they all atheists? Hardly. A fellow atheist and friend, Mojoey, blogs about ministers caught molesting children. He’s been doing this for a while and his list is extensive. Surely these men were raised with good so-called Christian morals. What went wrong? Are these so-called Christian morals not strong enough to overcome our common flawed humanity? When I see so many people commit horrible acts against their fellow man and know that they were raised with so-called Christian morals, I have to ask; what about Christian morals makes them worthy of emulation or respect?

How many average criminals, people acting immorally or unethically, are atheist? I don’t know exactly, but I would expect they are represented among the criminal class to about the same degree they are generally in society. I suggest the majority of those we’d call immoral and unethical criminals are religious believers, raised on some sort of religious moral code.

I further submit that the majority of atheists in America live lives indistinguishable from the average theist’s. If they can melt successfully into society, they must be living ethically/morally enough to escape notoriety.

All our ethics/morals are instilled in us at an early age. We are all taught the rules for membership in our society. We are taught early on how to get along in this Western society.

In reality, there are no Christian or atheist morals; there are social morals that are different in each society. If morality was absolute, different cultures would all behave identically. All morals are relative to the context in which they are applied.

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Consider that the majority of humanity has believed in some god or another for nearly as far back as we can trace societies. Consider the fact that throughout that same length of time man has been killing man, robbing, raping, abusing, hating, warring, denigrating, assaulting and refusing to hold the elevator door for their fellow human beings. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that a world without a belief in gods could be worse. At the worst it wouldn’t be any different than our world is now. There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t even be an improvement.

The only way democracy and religion are connected is that they are both ideals. In their purest form they both establish inhuman standards. We all do that to some degree. Many of us plan our day down to the minute. I dare say that in most cases our ideal schedule has suffered a few adjustments due to reality. The ideals, democracy and religion, likewise get adjusted and tweaked to accommodate our humanity. Absolute morals create a “guilt” factor to decision making, meaning we’ll most likely make social and political decisions based on emotion (feeling or avoiding guilt) rather than reason.

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