Mischaracterizations of your opponent bug me.

It strikes me as the height of arrogance to build up a weak conceptual effigy of your opponent and go on to easily dismantle the shoddy characterization. Discourse should either be a two way street where one is permitted to create their own message, which is then vulnerable to criticism, or to stick to laying out the strengths of one's own framework.



I have recently seen several such treatments of liberalism and atheism. Growing up Christian, I was endowed with a decent sense of right and wrong during Sunday school and from my friends and the other members of the community. I remember in middle school feeling a little bit odd about faith, about belief without evidence, but I countered these uncomfortable thoughts with renewed zeal. Once I actually read the basis of our faith, however, I realized that we could not have obtained our morals from such a backwards text. Obviously there are wise Proverbs, beautiful Psalms, and compassionate lessons from Jesus, but for every gem there seemed a piece of nonsense or outright horrific law. How could an omniscient being inspire so much nonsense? How are we supposed to sift the two sides of the Bible apart?

And then it struck me that our morals are the result of learned and ingrained norms that evolve over cultural and evolutionary time and that it is our obligation to move towards a more just and fair world. This obligation does not come from above, but from within, from our need to live in a large, interconnected world where no individual wants to suffer. If morals were endowed upon us by our Creator, why have they changed so much over the past 4000 years?

A theist I know says that this "moral relativism," which would also result if we had no immaterial self, leads to the logical conclusion that Mother Theresa is equivalent to Hitler (I'll leave the point that Mother Theresa's place as the pinnacle of morality is bogus for another day). He goes on to say that since we obviously do not act according to that conclusion, that atheists are living with some sort of cognitive dissonance and are intellectually bankrupt. I counter that a morality based on an interpretation of a book where any act from genocide to slavery is justified is far more relativistic and dangerous. The fact that no one in their right mind actually bases their morality on the bible is evidence that it is useless. Even if there were a god, pretending that we can glean its divine code seems to be another arrogant assumption.