That is essentially the rule I find is asserted whenever arguing with an atheist on "the question of evil", the alleged inseparability of religion and war, racism, sexism, crime, etc. one of their asserted disproofs of the existence of God.
In the last two or three years the point I've made here a number of times has come to interest me more, that,
1. whereas with most religious folk, at least in the monotheistic religions that we are mandated to hate and despise, it is a fact that a member of those religions would generally have to violate the most basic teachings of their religion to do serious evil, those religions provide at least that hurdle the evil doer has to to jump over.
2. Atheists don't have even that hurdle of metaphysical moral commandment to overcome in order to do the very things they
-rightly- slam religious people for doing.
3. It is my experience that when that is pointed out, some atheist will say, "well, of course, atheism doesn't have moral obligations to not do those things, atheism doesn't have any kind of moral code." As if that makes it superior to religions that DO CONTAIN MORAL CODES AGAINST DOING THE VERY THINGS THE ATHEIST COMPLAINS THAT RELIGIOUS PEOPLE DO!
Which is ridiculous because, just as religious people have to temporarily evacuate their professed beliefs to do evil forbidden by their religions,
4. ATHEISTS HAVE TO ENTIRELY EXIT ATHEISM IN ORDER TO HOLD THAT THOSE THINGS WHICH ATHEISM DOESN'T HOLD ARE FORBIDDEN ARE WRONG WHEN THEY ARE DONE BY PEOPLE WHO PROFESS RELIGION.
5. The go-to "question of evil" as asserted by atheists, while quite inadequate to address the "existence" of God, is a better demonstration of the inadequacy of atheism due to atheism not providing the competence to even name something as being evil in order to make the argument.
One of the few defenses atheists can make if you refuse to be distracted into not pressing the issue is to claim something along the line of "How could you imagine kindly, sweet, little old, professor (as it generally is) X could ever countenance anything evil?" Well, the first point is that any system of morality that relies on the disinclination of a contented, well-fed academic atheist to not be moved to commit evil is hardly a major hurdle to those who want to do so, despite having been given a PhD and a professorship*.
I've been to university and grad school, academic life is often like nothing so much as a tank of piranhas. And if you include, not only the actual commission of evil but, also, the advocacy of it, no, not even that but the RIGHTNESS of it, that hurdle barring academic evil was knocked flat centuries ago.
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This was brought to mind by two things, one is my reading one of those wacky, stupid and insane papers by "ethicists", as quite often out of some Australian university, quite often with some kind of connection to the atheist barmpot, Peter Singer, who we are all supposed to hold is some kind of expert on this ethics stuff. The paper in this case was entitled, After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? and perpetrated by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both, I believe from Melbourne University. It argued that infanticide for a period (unspecified as to how long) should be allowed because neonates and even infants aren't "persons" because they don't match a definition that another barmpot, Michael Tooley, came up with in another paper of the ancient vintage of 1972. Which, predictably, created a bit of a controversy. When the critics of Giubilini and Minerva and the editor of Journal of Medical Ethics, Julian Savulescu, got the predictable storm of protests, they were just shocked that people could criticize "ethicists" for merely following up on ideas that people like Peter Singer (identified in the comments as Savulescu's dissertation advisor) Michael Tooley and John Harris. As this idea has festered among the most ironically named academic profession "Ethicists" for going on half a century, in the English speaking world, proves that the "ethics" fostered among academic atheists today is no better at self appraisal than it was when Ernst Haeckel and Alfred Ploetz were saying similar thing more than a hundred thirty years before. And if you know the first thing about that, yes, they set such precedents in thought that led to the eugenics and T4 programs of murder that I wrote about a little while ago. That Peter Singer, with his family history, could promote infanticide doesn't lead me away from thinking that atheism is tied, not only to moral depravity, but fractured thinking and a stupendous inability to learn the most exigent lessons of the most recent and even personally relevant history.
Somewhere in the discussion after the fire storm of protest started the authors claimed that they hadn't advocated that infanticide be made legal, though their article most certainly called for it to be allowed. How you make that distinction while maintaining a pose of coherence is a curious thing to see, considering that you can already kill babies, only it's illegal if an all too seldom punished crime. I see the whole thing as evidence that the word "Ethicist" today generally means an atheist academic who spends their time thinking of threadbare utilitarian arguments for moral depravity so as to get their names in the news and them on shows like Fresh Air and in the online buzz feed. I assume everyone here has more than a passing problem with subjecting human beings, if not life in general, to the slippery and often sleazy methods of utilitarianism. Perhaps more of that in the future.
Later, while researching Michael Tooley online, I came across one of those debates about the existence of God between William Lane Craig and a celebrity atheist. It was not one of the more interesting ones because Tooley is no Sean Carroll or even Larry Krauss. In a rather astonishing turn of events, he tried to base his arguments on "the question of evil" which one would assume an academic advocate for murdering babies would not be found credible to make. I don't believe Craig was gauche enough to point that out, I'm not sure I wouldn't have.
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After an adulthood of pretending that it isn't the case, a decade of reading the unedited and edited thinking of atheists forces me to conclude that so much of the depravity that has issued from atheism, from even before Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's circle, Nietzsche's followers, and an enormous number of other names up to and including those named above is a direct result of their atheism, their materialism, the fact that they reject the idea of absolute moral truths and absolute moral obligations. Infanticide was asserted to be a downright social good by Haeckel and Darwin, something which is an idea which is inescapable in the case of children deemed "unfit" from Natural Selection as they created the theory.
The pretense of academic life, what the alleged value of a university education and the public funding of universities is based in, that it matters in real life, either is true or it isn't. That ideas presented within academia have the most basic requirement that they cohere also matters or the entire enterprise of academic life is a sheer and total fraud. Academics can't be allowed to have it both ways, to make claims that something which are a clear moral depravity are good and, indeed, at times are morally required and then to pretend that they didn't intend what they actually presented as having the reliability supposedly gained by peer review and the rest of the sometimes silly and gaudy regalia of academic publication.
And even more so, I can see no way to pretend that ideas such as that babies who have been born, who have an independent life, removed from consideration of the rights of their mother to their own bodily autonomy, can be killed at will of the parents are not a direct result of the intellectual and ideological basis from which those who articulate those conclusions work.
As I noted, we are supposed to despise those officially unfashionable monotheistic religions, because, it is alleged, they kill children, etc. But the very same atheists who make that accusation against, mostly, Christians, then turn around and either tolerate the assertion that acts such as infanticide are morally justifiable or assert that it is an actual good. Atheists demand to have it both ways, in both ways, and that all of those ways be held to benefit atheists and their ideology.
* I would wonder if, perhaps, in the same why that it is generally asserted that the saintly, pure scientists aren't the ones who produce weapons of mass destruction, environmental disasters, terrible legal and social results, it is those evil engineers who do it, that it will be held that it's those lesser academic beings, instructors, associate profs, etc. who bring academic atheism into dispute.
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