The Source of The Mighty Atheist Moral Indignation is Religion

Back when I was young and even more foolish than I am today, I once said that I'd rather have a president who was smart than one who was good.  My thinking was that a smart one would be less likely to pull the nuclear trigger and get us all killed.   That stupidity didn't last long because we got Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State and I realized that while I could name hundreds, perhaps thousands of very intelligent people the world would be better off without, Hank being a prime example,  I couldn't think of a single good person the world would be better off without.  Which lesson could explain why evil is allowed to remain in the world, as an example to slow thinkers such as I.

Similarly, while I'd rather have not gone through the neo-atheist fad of the past eleven or so years, it has forced me to learn a lot of things.  Most of the extended pieces I've written began in thinking about the hate-talk of online atheists and in the few of their books I've managed to choke down.  

Along the way, in my very late middle age when many people have stopped changing, it has had the most radical of effects on my thinking and in my life.  It has so basically challenged so much of what I picked up in high school, college, and in reading much and discussing much of what is said on the would-be left, that I am hardly the same person I was before I went online.   It has been a long, slow process of baptism, a series of rejections of what might rightly be considered Satanic deceptions, many of them masked as enlightenment.  Only not when you look at their results and their real existence in the world.   That, when the ideas, theories, programs and policies enter into the real world, that's when their real nature is revealed.  

I recently reposted a piece about  Sean Carroll's convening of a summit of contemporary atheist thinkers.  Though, possibly reflecting Carroll's prejudice, it was rather too heavily weighted with scientists who were out of their depth and too skimpy on philosophers who may have been both less arrogantly certain of their beliefs and less inadequate in addressing ideas far more complicated than scientists are accustomed to deal with.  But perhaps that isn't exactly true.   I pointed out how one of the philosophers failed to establish a basis for morality in the scientific trappings of evolutionary psychology only to be shot down by Steve Weinberg, doing what atheists inevitably do, rejecting what they don't like as unfounded, rejecting that even that sciency exposition of would-be morality was binding on him and that he didn't care about the welfare of people outside of his family and university department.   As I pointed out, he also said that he gave up that other great atheist attempt to do what couldn't be done, utilitarianism.  Considering the enormous intellectual effort expended on behalf of utilitarianism by some of the brightest minds of the 19th century and beyond, it was rather stunning to see how the atheist MO could brush it aside as easily as it does God.  

And that is the biggest of the problems of the, frankly, ridiculous idea that evolutionary psychology can make up a genetically inherited "trait" that corresponds to morality, or religion or "ethics" or any number of other things* and that, since we still talk about things like that today, it proves that their materially, genetically based "morality" or "altruism" etc. must have provided a reproductive advantage to those animals that had it, and so that "fact" constitutes their substitute for the idea that what is moral is determined by the will of God.   Leaving aside that there is not the slightest amount of material evidence that backs up this entire effort to establish morality as a material substance, they provide nothing, not the least amount of reason that anyone who wants to violate their "morality" can't merely choose to and, if they believe they are clever enough, they can either pass the consequences onto someone else or escape them, entirely. 

And in Steve Weinberg's denial of neo-Darwinian and utilitarian assertions there is the most obvious of all downfalls of any  materialistic attempt to derive morality scientifically.  Morality and immorality don't exist in the physical world except as expressions of human choice.  Humans choosing how to act, what to do, are what create acts that are moral or immoral.  Weinberg doesn't get it because he refuses to accept the reality of anything but the most reductionist of all analysis of physical matter. You can't get to morality with that method and if you insist that nothing insusceptible to that method is real then you will deny that morality is anything that can't be shoe-horned into your reductionist faith.  Weinberg, apparently, fooled himself into believing that utilitarianism was an adequate substitute for a time but eventually, perhaps self-servingly, talked himself out of it.  Morality, to become real in the world, isn't a material substance but it is the metaphysical having a real effect on lives, having the most real of all effects in the world of sense and consequence.   There is nothing in materialism that can account for its reality or its ability to produce those effects, so notably different from those of immorality.  

Having been rather stupid on that point myself in the past,  not wanting to make my atheist friends and family uncomfortable, I pretended to not see the problem of what powers people to make decisions that are unselfish instead of selfish, those decisions that depend on more than mere whimsical indifference, those decisions that require personal sacrifice and even the sacrifice of those we love.  So many of the most important moral decisions require far more than the mere desire of genteel folk to not be SEEN as bad.   To prevent so many of the worst and most destructive acts that people do, individually, and even more so in groups and in total requires self-sacrifice of the kind that materialism can't explain the necessity of making.

For all its notable failures to change things, as arbitrary as it may seem, the religious assertions of morality are entirely more potent than any pseudo-scientific assertion of reproductive advantage or artificial morality based on pure reason.   The strongest of those, those which require justice be done to others, that we should love others as we love ourselves and our nearest and dearest are far more potent in correcting mistaken ideas of morality than anything materialism can come up with.  Their vestiges within the culture of atheists, remnants of exactly the commands by God that they have denied, are the only basis for the frequently hurled fulminations against the short comings of religious believers.  Because there is nothing in materialism, within any system of atheist thought that I've ever encountered that could explain why the 2% of those found guilty by the Inquisition shouldn't be killed, why the Crusades shouldn't have happened**, why there shouldn't have been forced conversions and the entire catalog of sins committed in the name of religion.   I've asked atheists, repeatedly, when they bring those up to explain to me what in atheism forbids those acts, why they are wrong.  I can show them in scriptures, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist,... where those are forbidden but there is nothing in atheism that can even say they are wrong and why they shouldn't be done.  Atheist indignation against those acts have to have some other origin and it's not in materialism, in atheism, in science or in pure reason. The source of the mighty atheist moral indignation is religion.  

P.S.  When you consider the enormous intellectual effort that went into utilitarianism, by some brilliant scholars, of the lengths to which they had to go to present something like an intellectual framework for their substitute for traditional morality, you wonder how they could have expected it to have an effect in the lives of the hundreds of millions and billions of ordinary mortals without the time to master their dogma and doctrine.   Not to mention that they hardly were in total agreement, themselves.  Utilitarianism strikes me as one of the most impractical intellectual efforts of the past two centuries. 

* It should be pointed out that, as they insist on this or that "violating the laws of physics" that there are no greater violators of the Law of the Conservation of Mass and Energy than the materialists, themselves.  While I will leave it to others to critique the most massive creation of more matter and energy in history, the creation of "dark matter" and, when their equations still wouldn't work, "dark energy"  Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many of the lesser lights of Darwinian fundamentalism,  fanatical atheists, all, are continually and magically making their own words flesh.  Literally, creating genes out of nothing but their whim and asserting that those genes are not merely the inarticulate, inactive genetic dross they are always asserting as more proof of "no God" but they go on to create proteins and higher structures in the very real physical universe.   The more I look at Richard Dawkin's "science" and Daniel Dennett's neo-Darwinism the more bogus it looks and the more hypocritical their atheism is. 

** One of the more frequently encountered hypocrisies of atheists these days is their citation of the Crusades in their rote recitation of the sins of religion.  Well, no one living today has the power to do anything about the sins of Christians in the middle ages.   But, as they put the sins of those church fathers on their descendants into the fourth and fifth hundredth generations,  they adore Christopher Hitchens, one of the intellectual props of the Bush II crusade (Bush said the word and they're stuck with it) which has killed people on a scale that the most demented sword and arrow Crusader couldn't have imagined.  Not to mention Sam Harris and his insane, proposed nuclear Crusade against the same cities that his atheist followers pretend to mourn for in the most removed of historical retrospect.