Between Rounds Analyses

A resolution broken in less than 24 hours was that I wouldn't get involved in a blog brawl this weekend.  I got into it on Saturday and, since it rained here, thank God, yesterday and continues today, I can't get much done in my garden.  So it kept up.   I don't think I ever thought it out, as such, but I have kind of adopted the scorched Earth policy in debating online atheists.  I think the topics are serious enough in their importance and in the results that are guaranteed to come with the adoption of their ideology that any point they raise that can be refuted, must be refuted.   As their talking points are all quite threadbare from being hauled out for years, decades and centuries, once you know the refutation of them, it is necessary to keep repeating those every time you run into them.

There were several aspects in the claims of the atheists during this brawl, some of them identifying themselves as "Humanists" one claiming to have been something of a "Humanist" chaplain.   I'll quickly go over several of those in some posts.

One of their favorites is the citation of the many historical and contemporary instances in which purportedly believing Christians have murdered, oppressed, enslaved, etc. people, violating just about everything Jesus said and the Law and the teachings of the apostles and early members of the Church in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the earliest documented generations of the religion.   Since they come up with pithy aphorisms to hurl against religion, I made up one.

To claim that the violations of the teachings of Jesus by Christians debunk Christianity makes about as much sense as claiming that mistakes in multiplying debunk arithmetic.

You could substitute the frequent violations by scientists of scientific method debunking scientific method or any number of other idols of the atheists in that formula.

But even weirder ideas come up when, in response to your pointing out the crimes and sins of atheists, atheists declaim any responsibility for their ideology because "Atheism is the absence of belief in a god(s). That's it. No extras, no side orders, no creed and no manifesto." as just one of them put it.

Which makes any criticisms made by atheists of the crimes and sins of religious people logically incoherent.  They would have to leave their ideology to even find the idea that what such criminals and sinners do was wrong, never mind to find the pose of moral indignance that is a hall mark of the skit that they put on daily, in many places.   Even by their own and always opportunistically made assertion, atheism lacks the ability to determine that something is immoral, yet, somehow they make accusations of immorality in others in support of atheism.

Clearly they have to swipe the idea of morals and immorality from outside of their atheism because, by their own admission, atheism doesn't produce those.

And, since, just about to a person, they erect an idol they identify as science* as their replacement god, they can't find the idea of morals or immorality from that source either.  They will, also, inevitably exempt science from any dealing with morals or morality, declaiming that the pure, chaste entity that is "science" doesn't truck in such stuff and is fully exempt from any moral analysis of what "it" does in the world.

As it is, atheists do what amoral ideologues always do, they try to have it both ways depending on what is to their advantage at any single point in a brawl.  They will use morality that they would have had to take from some other ideology or intellectual manifestation,  almost always those derived from religion to attack religious peoples' failures in living up to those moral teachings which atheism doesn't not only produce but frequently attacks.  But when someone calls to mind things like the scores of millions killed under atheist regimes, they suddenly revert to claiming their ideological privilege because "atheism is just an absence of belief".   I asked the "Humanist" chaplain,

I really would like to ask you, as a "Humanist" chaplain, where do you find moral positions since neither atheism nor science produce those?

That is  a question that I've never gotten an answer to when I asked it.  Of course atheists don't hold their side up to the same moral meter stick that they do religion.

I used to say that was something they share in common with all fundamentalists.  But I think that does an injustice to some fundamentalists who do, unlike many of the ones whose faces get on TV, do hold themselves up against their understanding of their moral obligations as laid out in scriptures. Only you're not likely to find any who made a successful show biz career out of that practice.  I might disagree with their conclusions and their reading of those scriptures but at least they're trying.   I would encourage them to take what Jesus said more seriously, I think they'd never oppress or kill anyone if they did.

*  Of course, when they talk about "science" they are referring to their ultra-romanticized, non-existent ideal form which they, somehow as materialists, seem to believe exists independent of the scientists who invented science, set its methods, staked out the territory it covered (originally much less than it has gained under the ideological hegemony of atheists and others) and declared their invention exempt from considerations of morality, despite the one clear fact, that science produces ever more powerful and efficacious means of doing evil, often with the total and complete knowledge of the scientists who devise those means of doing evil things.  Unless anyone needs to be reminded, the candidates that will most likely kill us all, nuclear weapons, climate change due to the activities of the extraction industries, etc. are all brought to us by scientists.

That those perils have had their scientist alarm sounders and even, occasionally, organized opposition doesn't count for much.   I would like to be able to question such scientist activists around the matter of the moral exemptions that scientists granted themselves and the role that exemption has played in the near total impotence of their efforts to counter the results of science.