Saturday, October 11, 2008

It Was Just a Matter of Time: Atheists to Blame for Financial Mess

You knew it was just a matter of time before some good Christian blamed the evil atheists for the mess on Wall Street. Well sure enough, here comes Ken Conner"

'For decades, secularists in America scoffed at religion and her offspring, morality and ethics. They removed religion from the realm of "truth" and reduced it to mere "opinion." Truth was limited to that which could be objectified, quantified, and verified. Since that could not be accomplished with religion (at least on this side of eternity), "religious truth" was deemed an oxymoron. Absolutes were out, relativism was in. Morals became "relative" and ethics became "situational." Virtue was rejected as an antiquated notion. Results were all that mattered.'

Sorry Ken, but it wasn't secularists that removed religion from the realm of truth and reduced it to mere opinion. It was all of you religious people who, despite your claims, have been fighting and killing each other for centuries over just what that "truth" is. You remind me of the creationists who claim all hominid fossils are either 100% ape or 100% human, and yet disagree with each other over which is which. You all claim to have The Truth (tm), but all your truths are different. We have a word for that: opinion.

Morals didn't "become" relative, nor ethics situational. They simply were, as evidenced by our travels all over the world contacting many civilizations which had very different ideas of what was moral and ethical, and yet functioned just fine. Contrast this with math or science, where 7 is considered prime all over the world, which is considered roughly spherical by everyone with the slightest ability to gather evidence about it.

Humanity's explosion in knowledge happened when we restricted our inquiries to that which can be objectified, quantified, and verified. In other words, science. No longer could someone make a claim based solely on supposed revelation from supposed dieties and be given credibility. THAT would be relative.

Those of us with a scientific point of view don't reject the concepts of morals, ethics and virtue. Were that the case, our prisons would be filled with atheists instead of believers. We simply recognize their arbitrary, subjective nature, which reduces our desire to force them on others. This is in stark contrast to those who treat their subjective views as The Truth (tm), who history shows have been more than willing to force their views on others, even to the point of becoming terrorists and flying airplanes into buildings. If that doesn't make "religious truth" an oxymoron, I don't know what would.

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