Atheism: Bernie's Reference

From Bernie’s Referred Article:

Tom Flynn: Secular humanism propounds a rational ethics based on human experience. It is consequentialist: ethical choices are judged by their results.

Russ: In other words, if you get away with it, try it again.

Tom: Secular humanist ethics appeals to science, reason, and experience to justify its ethical principles.

Russ: In other words, if you keep on getting away with it, keep on doing it. You may have mastered the art of adultery, theft and murder without being caught. Logic, reason and experience teach that it is OK to keep on.

Tom: Observers can evaluate the real-world consequences of moral decisions and intersubjectively affirm their conclusions.

Russ: Using this logic, it is OK to have sex with an animal as long as it is not harming the animal, self or society.

Tom: Millennia of human experience have given rise to a core of “common moral decencies” shared by almost all.

Russ: This is where you err. Millennia of human evolution has NOT erased and replaced in our society those who are predisposed to adultery, rape, murder, theft and similar crimes. Yet evolution is supposed to cull out such bad genetics because they are not dominant and are harmful.

Tom: Human happiness and social justice are the larger goals of secular humanist ethics.

Russ: Not true. Otherwise atheistic humanists would be the most moral of all citizens.

Tom: Quoting Owen Flanagan: “These conditions include freedom from want and fear, freedom of conscience, freedom to inquire, freedom to self-govern, and so on.”

Russ: Freedom of conscience? Hogwash. When you SIN that guilt you sense is the ‘image of God’ within you telling you that you are a sinner. You cannot blame it on genetics.

Tom: Secular humanism takes upon itself the Enlightenment project of emancipating individuals from illicit controls of every type: the political control of repressive regimes; the ecclesiastical control of organized religion; even the social controls of societal and family expectations, conventional morality, and the tyranny of the village.

Russ: Look at what secular humanism has done to Europe. They have the most government, the highest taxes, the smallest houses and cars and the least freedom. That is where Barack Obama is steering us as fast as he can.

Tom: Atheism and freethought trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on rational inquiry and curiosity about the workings of nature.

Russ: The Greeks worshipped human gods and enjoyed orgies. I wonder where their ideas of gods being half animals came from.

After centuries of humanist wisdom, they still cannot tell us whether the chicken or the egg came first.