SikhNet Discussion Forum


Re: Opinion - Beliefs That Have Harmed Mankind
Posted by Jass Singh Send Email to Author on Tuesday, 8/28/2001 10:32 PM MDT
Re: Is religion any good?
Kevin writes: < One of the common accusations the faithful make against atheists is that the latter have no morality. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are their favourite examples of what happens when people don't believe in God. Never mind that every one of Hitler's senior lieutenants came from staunch Roman Catholic families or that Stalin himself had planned to enter a seminary, so one could readily argue that they brought a religious mindset (i.e. irrational, intolerant, anti-empirical) to their brand of atheism. >
He is quite correct in that atheists/agnostics may indeed be very "moral." But he erroneously lumps all religious mindsets as "irrational, intolerant and "anti-empirical" and has no basis to make this universal assertion. His comments about the Nazis and Stalin, however are wrong. People can come from all sorts of backgrounds (e.g. Roman Catholics) but that is irrelevant since it is not always the philosophical driving force that motivates them. The Nazis and Communists were driven by the philosophy of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism and Nietzschian assumptions and not biblical Christianity. He needs to read Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and Marx's "Das Capital."
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He writes < The first fallacy of the argument is demonstrated by the fact that believers themselves do not generally adhere to the absolute moral laws laid down by their God. >
This is a Red hisring as he has changed the topic, and his new assertion is a strawman argument which is in fact an ad hominem attack on people of faith and utterly irrelevant to his argument, that atheists can be "moral."

He writes: < The Christian God, for example, holds that people should be put to death for sins such as adultery, fornication, blasphemy, homosexuality and a woman not being a virgin on his wedding night. Now the Christian either has to agree that his God is a fiend, or admit that God changes His rules, or conclude that the Bible isn't actually the Word of God on every page. >
This is a strawman argument as his premise is false and without supporting arguments.

In his paragraph about mathematics, he is committing the fallacy of mixing categories. In regards to Godel's "Incompleteness Theorem," he needs to define and qualify "Completeness." Furthermore he is reducing mathematics to a monolithic system. Geometry (and there are different systems of geometry) should not be a touchstone for arithmetic. Arithmetic is something very different, since it does not deal with the realm of time and space. It is wrong headed to assimilate arithmetic into geometry and it is a forgiori wrongheaded to assimilate ethics into geometry.

He state: < Nobody has yet given a satisfactory answer as to where morality comes from. But I have every confidence that some competent philosopher, armed with the paradigm of the computational theory of the mind, evolutionary psychology and the data from comparative ethnography, will one day explain how homo sapiens' moral beliefs arise and why such beliefs work and fail in particular circumstances. >
Talk about blind faith and irrationality, where's his argument? No one can ever get an "IS" from an "OUGHT" whether he talks of the brain, of computational theory of the mind, evolutionary psychology, or data. They are different categories; one is descriptive & the other prescriptive.

He write: < It is also an incontrovertible fact that those societies which have eschewed religious morality in favour of public or secular morality (i.e. ethics) are more peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian and law-abiding than those countries where religion still wields public authority. >
Once again, it's a mere assertion, where is his argument?

Jass Singh


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