"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
A Response on a Different Blog Slightly Edited
Dawkins, in line with atheists going back to the dawn of written documentation, has denied that evil and good are anything except social conventions. Coyne has said pretty much the same thing, both based in some of the more baseless assertions of psychology pretending to be evolutionary biology.
"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins A River Out of Eden
In that you've got the problem. If that's true then the entire program of the real left, equality, inherent rights, a binding moral obligation for people to respect those rights indiscriminately and even when it is disadvantageous, the entire basis of the left is false. It is entirely compatible with the worst dictatorships in history, it is, essentially, the entire economic ideology of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the Bush Crime Family.
The atheist alleged-left ends up, when taken to its logical conclusion, supports the bases of the far right. It is biologically determinist and negates the reality of moral obligations, equality, rights, etc. The stupid analysis that put Marxism on the left is based in a few idealistic lines from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, something that Marx left behind as he attempted to make his theory more "scientific", and you can read "atheistic" in place of that, because it is far more successfully atheistic than it is scientific. His critique of capitalism is brilliant, his outline of a political future is a total and absolute disaster because he really, at bottom, didn't believe that those metaphysical bases, inherent rights, equality, the moral obligation to respect rights, were real. The left has failed continually when atheists have asserted control over it. It's time the real left stopped being duped by a few good lines spouted during the year of failed European revolutions.
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