I can't tell you when I first came to suspect that materialism and the atheism that ideology was constructed to serve would lead to amoral depravity. I suspect it might have been while reading one American atheist psychologist or sociologist or "ethicist". I can tell you what the final nail in that coffin was, it was the blog The Atheist Ethicist * in which one Alonzo Fyfe was and, I'm kind of surprised to find, is still trying to find some kind of artificial atheist substitution for morality in his own, apparently going-nowhere interpretation of that old, rather obviously stupid atheist attempt to do the same in 18th century British utilitarianism. The rather glaring moral problems in the idea that morality is defined by "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" has been known for a very long time. Among those are:
1. The idea that we could possibly determine "the greater happiness" never mind determining the number of people that would make happy, is pretty much absurd on its face.
2. The idea that we have the foresight to determine the ultimate or even future results of things that make people happy now which might turn sour and cause enormous unhappiness to even more people, perhaps all people, requires giving people, now, super-human powers that they obviously don't have.
3. The idea that we can determine the ranking of causes of happiness and unhappiness on that kind of scale is absurd. There have been proponents of utilitarianism who, when confronted with such ideas of whether or not murdering every last Jew in the world would lead to the happiness of all of the survivors, have been forced on the power of their utilitarian creed, to float the idea that such a type of thing would have to be determined to be right.
I haven't seen anything in any articulation of utilitarianism that has gotten past any of the problems with it, I think the intellectual tergiversations that Fyfe has gone through for his "desire utilitarianism" and Peter Singer for his bizarre articulations of it which, while vastly popular among atheists seems to center on that most exciting thing about what has pervertedly been called "ethics" in university philosophy departments, drawing up lists of people it's not only OK to murder, but who should be murdered. I certainly don't see any of the various species of utilitarianism going back to Bentham and John Stuart Mills which doesn't take the "question of evil" atheists throw up against God and greatly exacerbate it by advocating godly powers to make decisions like that among human beings. No doubt led by university trained "ethicists".
A lot of very smart people, going back centuries, now, have tried to find an atheist, materialist, "scientific" replacement for morality, mostly the morality articulated by the Jewish-Christian scriptures and all I see is it getting worse and more depraved. I think in Peter Singer we can attribute a lot of that increase in depravity to his and other such utilitarians and "ethicists" desire to pretend you can latch onto the repute of Darwin to give persuasive "scientific" force to their efforts. But as I've spent scores of posts to documenting in the word of Darwin and his appointed followers, Darwinism is morally depraved, inevitably, because natural selection is about grading organisms, including human beings according to some notion of "fitness" and cutting them and their possible or real offspring from the future, through involuntary sterilization in the more "humane" versions of that but, ususally, getting to the murder of millions, tens of millions, and not putting out of consideration the murders of hundreds of millions of people.
Atheism has produced depravities in intellectual thought, into academic life, introduced such depravities into polite consideration that more than match anything you can throw out in the long history of Christianity or Judaism or even the "historical" books of the Old Testament. Considering they're talking about murdering people, infants, others, I have never heard much in the way of proportionate or sufficiently strong atheist academic or even the NPR-Fresh Air level** criticism of a Peter Singer who are, after all, calling for the murders of infants or such utilitarians who contemplate the moral rightness of murdering all of any ethnic group for the "ultimate happiness" of more people that would be murdered in such a utilitarian fantasy. Consider the virtual non-existence of that among polite society, especially among those people who will point to the stories in Joshua or other books of the Old Testament identifying them as conclusive evidence of the depravity of all religion and its danger to the world, today. Those killings in Canaan might or might not be a report of history, the moral nature of them have been debated repeatedly because they are at variance with the morality of the Commandments of Judaism and the Gospel of Jesus. Get back to me when atheists spend anywhere near as much time debating the morality of Darwin's theory as even he contemplated it being applied to the human species, something the Nazis and eugenicists actually did do in living historical memory. Consider that especially in light of the revival of eugenics talk which has gone from science and academia into the popular press, our politics and the courts.
I think it's gone on long enough so that we can be fairly certain that whenever materialist-atheist philosophers or "ethicists" are confronted with these questions, eventually they'll come around to drawing up a list of who we can or, eventually, should kill.
I don't think today's or atheists in the future will be any more clever than those of the past. Their prescriptions for lesser problems of morality than who should we murder are generally not much less problematic.
I would invite you to look at the mental gyrations and gymnastics that Alonzo Fyfe has to go through in his seemingly futile articulation of his basis for morality and ask yourself how any such attempt is supposed to work among everyday people who will certainly never even hear the word "utilitarian" in the governance of their lives, how they are supposed to make those calculations of which goods are "greater" which will result in the greater happiness to "greater numbers" than the number of those who will be entirely unhappy with it. Ask yourself how comfortable you would be having that being the basis of actions by Congress, the Senate, the Executive branch or the morally depraved Supreme Court, of them having that as the basis of their deliberations and decisions. I ask you that, especially, considering the universe of concern of the Republican Party today, when they have rigged elections that put them in control even when they have fewer votes than their opponents.
Atheism doesn't work, materialism doesn't work except to produce depravity. I think what we see in Putin's criminal state is what you can expect will be the eventual outcome of those, no morality at all.***
* Thinking about it as I'm writing this, I think for Fyfe, as for virtually all of the atheist "ethicists" the "ethics" aren't their primary concern, it's the promotion of atheism. I think that's a primary motive that is shared by a lot of people in academia, even in the sciences. I think that accounts for how some of them could say some of the most amorally depraved things and not bat can eyelash, because they are smart enough to know such depravity is a logical inevitability in their promotion of atheism and materialism. There is no way to get by the fact that materialism inevitably demotes human beings to the status of objects which have no rights and no moral obligations. Eventually, every atheist system of "morality" will be reduced to that status, it's inescapable based in that hard fact of what materialism is.
** I think they're too polite to really push it, they don't want to appear uncivil to those who advocate murder under the wing of academia and intellectual repute, or they don't want to be unfashionably concerned with such moral questions. They might be considered unfashionably unscientific and "objective" if they called it what it is, obvious amoral depravity, the kind of morality that might be practiced by Eichmann, Putin, Trump or so many others.
*** Since Putin's pose of support for the Russian Orthodox Church will be brought up, I think it's merely a matter of utility to him, as much a tool of suckering the greatest number of Russians to support him, eliminating the effective opposition of what should be a force of moral persuasion against keeping someone as evil as he is in office. I would certainly have no problem with a deep criticism of the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church for its role in producing the amoral catastrophe of the Russian Mafia State, today. However, in the case of the Patriarch of Moscow, he's in violation of the morality of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, I defy any utilitarian to show the equations of what principle of utilitarianism Putin could be held to be in definitive violation of.
Update: I will try to look it up later, but I believe it was the geneticist Karl Pearson who defined Darwinism in terms of "death rate". It is, actually, what it is, the belief that natural selection is a force of nature, like gravity or other basic laws of physics or chemistry, turns death into a creative force, determining the future of life, speciation, etc. It turns death into a creator god, of sorts. And, as you can see even from the earliest articulations by Darwin and his named, chosen disciples, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, etc. they all anticipated the active use of death, even through intentional policy, as a means of "improving" the human species. That's what all my blog posts mentioned above did, they proved that those men said those things. What Karl Pearson contemplated as a result of his belief in that was as depraved as the musings of any Nazi physiologist or even physician.
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