Dazu gibt es bis heute keine Alternative.

steve simelsNovember 19, 2015 at 1:45 PM
"There is nothing in science, in materialism, in an atheist-secular society which has the strength to tame and restrain such ideas."

I hate to break it you, Sparky, but there's nothing in religion to tame and restrain those ideas either. Compliance is voluntary last time I looked.

Well, I wasn't going to post this but, reconsidering, I can point out several typical atheist habits of dishonest thinking in it. 

1.  Notice that even someone as ignorant as Simels isn't so stupid as to claim that science, materialism, atheist-secular society has any definitive holdings that can restrain the ideas that in their least extreme forms lead to inequality and in their most extreme form call for the mass murder of anyone but the whitest of the white people.    That is, of course, because there isn't anything. That doesn't keep even some of the most famous atheists, notably Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, pretend those can do what it so much can't do.  I'd go into Harris taking on Hume over that question but I really don't want to have to read more ignorant and irrational thinking this week.   

2. Notice even someone as dishonest as Simels doesn't deny that religions do have prohibitions on such things.  That is certainly true of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  As the prominent atheist intellectual and historian Jurgen Habermas noted, 

"Das Christendom ist für das normative Selbstverständnis der Moderne nicht nur eine Vorläufergestalt oder ein Katalysator gewesen. Der egalitäre Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben, von autonomer Lebensführung und Emanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral, Menschenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen sind, ist unmittelbar ein Erbe der jüdischen Gerechtigkeits- und der christlichen Liebesethik. In der Substanz unverändert, ist dieses Erbe immer wieder kritisch angeeignet und neu interpretiert worden. Dazu gibt es bis heute keine Alternative. Auch angesichts der aktuellen Herausforderungen einer postnationalen Konstellation zehren wir nach wie vor von dieser Substanz. Alles andere ist postmodernes Gerede"

Which I recently translated as:  

Christianity was not merely a normative understanding or catalyst of the very concept of modernity. Egalitarian universalism,  from which the ideas of freedom and social concord, autonomous life and emancipation of individual moral thought, human rights and democracy spring from the Jewish ethic of Justice and the Christian ethic of love.  Unchanged in substance, this has been appropriated again and again and newly interpreted.  For this purpose, there is still no alternative.  This is even true now in a post-national world, we still eat of this substance.  Everything else is just post modern babble.

I have seen it mis-translated on several atheist sites in a manner which diminishes the credit which Habermas explicitly gave to Judaism and, especially Christianity, through which that tradition became culturally influential in Europe.  In all of the intellectual cogitation and agitation by science, materialist philosophy, secularism, nothing else has been found that feeds the very substance of egalitarian, democratic, civil society.  And if anyone is likely to know what that would be, it would be Jurgen Habermas. 

3.  Since religion is not uniformly successful in making people practice those things which Habermas attributes to religion,   Der egalitäre Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben, von autonomer Lebensführung und Emanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral, Menschenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen... 
that failure is the fault of religion which asserts those values instead of the forces, such as atheism, materialism, consumerism, etc. which discredits and militates against them.   A good example of that is the infamous statement of Richard Darwkins, 

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.

If there is anything which is to blame for the failure of people to respect the rights of other people, of other living beings, of the environment, it is absurd to blame those who insist that that is the definition of good, it is those people who claim there is no objectively real category as good and that the ultimate truth holds, not moral standards to live by but "nothing but pitiless indifference".  

5.  People like Simels would be the first to howl at the top of his lungs if religion tried to enforce even its most universal and obviously beneficial of religious moral holdings.   Nor is that the way it should be done.  The way religious morality becomes effective is through people accepting the restrictions on what they might want to do to the extent that they don't do bad things.  From there comes the communal adoption of those standards as laws through democratic politics.   Christian authorities have no more right to take political power as religious authorities when no less an authority for Christians than Jesus said that he wasn't an earthly ruler, that his realm was not of this world.  

I find it funny when atheists whine and complain that religious people aren't universally successful in enforcing their morality on society when the only means for them to do that would be things that atheists whined even harder at them attempting to do.   Look at the absurd whining today about the past history of blue laws, restricting the opening of stores, bars, etc. on Sunday and the whining about those vestiges of that which are left, if they are anywhere.  And that's nothing compared to what Simels is pretending he wants religion to be able to do.  

Atheists mostly whine and complain and pose and pretend.  Believe me when I tell you that Simels' atheist buddies will pretend to have read this when he dishonestly presents it to them. They seldom read and even more seldomly research and almost never make tight logical arguments.  Mostly they just lie. 

Update:  Blah, blah, blah, Neil Degrasse Tyson blah, blah..... 
Get back to me when he says something on more than a Discovery channel educated high school sophomore level.