Hello Sandman,
Originally posted by Sandman
I vehemently disagree. I consider myself to be a moral person and I'm an atheist. I do not act this way because I fear the "bayonet". It is because I expect to be treated in the same way.
I hope you'll forgive me if I don't get into much of a debate on this as, I'm really way too busy. Maybe later?
Actually, I accidently mixed a quote from Acton with a quote from another man, Here is the full text of the actual quote I was referring to. It was actually Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, 1849.
"All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man."I would expect you to disagree with this, as I probably once would have. But put simply, no matter how much we might hate this fact, the foundations for Western Ethics are based on the Ethical system of the bible. There is no basis in the "law of nature" for
"loving ones neighbor as oneself" , in fact observe the wolf pack or the looters and you'll see precisely the opposite law at work.
Did we have morals before the closing of the canon? Well to a great extent all the ethics of Western civilization post-dated the closing of the canon, but certainly one could appeal to civilizations that had ethics without the bible (Ancient Greece for instance). There I'd say the essential truth of the quote above is still binding. Why did the Greeks follow their ethical system? Because even they felt it to be based on principles set down and enforced by their creators, the same could be said of all ancient civilizations.
For my part, I'd say that the vast majority of their ethics were in fact informed by the conscience that their creator gave them.
But Sandy, attempts to create a stable system of ethics in Atheism always fail. The very denial of any absolutes immediately means that they are open to the charge of being arbitrary and instead of being an unchanging code, they are as mutable as silly putty and ultimately all get swept away as desire masters restraint every time. Nietszche dismissed them as contemptible tools by which the weak seek to master the strong, Sartre and De Beauvoir both tried to work out an atheistic ethic and ultimately failed as to paraphrase Sartre,
without a fixed reference point all other points are ultimately meaningless. All we have then are preferences which must be enforced by the state, but which are subject to endless flux and an accompanying "will-to-power" struggle.
So what do most Atheists do? They trade on borrowed capital. Most generally agree to follow a system of ethics, but when their preferences differ from the prevailing system...
- SEAGOON
