"In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines..." GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
How about the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign, which is putting punchy one liners on the side of Chicago buses? One of their creations, "You can be good without God", purports goodness in the absence of God. It's rather difficult to establish morality in the absense of God - further difficult to set a standard of goodness in the absence of morality. The logical outworking of atheism is Nihilism. If there is no over spreading meaning to life, why should I attempt to speckle it with little pockets of meaning? If there is no giver of goodness, how shall I attempt to give what is good?
Comments (2)
It is ridiculous to say that without God, there is no reason for morality. People need to adhere to certain standards of behavior in order for them to live together in a civilized way. No god or godess has any relevance to that simple truth.
Welcome, lonelywanderer - Thanks for 'stopping in'!
I'm not on this site much anymore since Xanga seems to be hitting the history books.
Very true - people need similar standards of behavior to build a civilization.
This is what I understand you to say: Morality is the sum of a culture's behavioral standard. In other words, morality depends on culture for meaning and context. Morality is the simple expression of a culture's collective beliefs. Is that right? If that's all morality is, the best we can hope for is social consensus - "human solidarity" as
Christopher Hitchens puts it. No, we certainly don't need God to establish social consensus, but what would be the point?
Here's where I think we diverge. Subjective morality an incoherent framework on which to build society. If morality is defined by culture and culture made coherent by morality they've formed a self-annihilating loop. If morality is the result of chance, genetics, and time, it is the sum of its parts - nothing more. A society built
on this morality will be quickly decay to chaos. An individual life built from this framework isn't witty, interesting, or meaningful - it's just a stupid farce under an umbrella of meaninglessness (nothing personal, roughly quoting Sartre). When we
reject God while insisting on the validity of morality, we reject the cause while clinging to the effect.
It's impossible to establish meaningful morality without a moral standard larger than culture. There must be something anchoring morality - a common morality - for it
to have any real influence. There's a lot ways to establish objective morality, but I think the most viable option is God.
Consider the root of subjective morality. Objective morality is just another victim of the intellectual pessimism prevailing today. Relativism is the gravestone of modernism. We no longer believe in God, nor do we believe in each other. Therefore, life seems meaningless. Is this reality, or is relativism simply a product of our culture?
May you find answers in your lonely wandering... as CS Lewis was, may you be surprised by joy.