Joanna
----- Original Message ----- I fully and enthusiastically agree. That's one thing that drives me batty about a certain breed of atheist ideologues (but by no means all atheists): their insistence that you don't need religion to tell right from wrong. Well, of course you do! Otherwise you're just talking about personal preference, which is fine as far as it goes, but will hardly convince anyone of anything.
The really lazy ones fall back on crude moralistic challenges. "But don't you think that *genocide *is wrong?" Who knows what they even mean. They certainly don't seem to!
My favorite reactionary (who's sharper than a lot of would-be revolutionaries), David Bentley Hart, has written about this at length:
"The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.
"Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right ..."
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 5:27 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Just a side note: my objection to ethical arguments does not apply to
> those whose ethical principles are grounded in religion. In that case the
> ethical arguments have a ground. But when atheists insist that politics
> must have an ethical grounding in mid-air (that is nowhere) they reduce
> politics to mere gut feeling. Ethics as their own ground is deeply seated
> bourgeois ideology.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
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