Never Trust Anyone Whose Only Got One Book

To continue my fun Saturday I thought I'd share my favourite comic of all times views on my favourite subject:

Come Here...

After my last rant, I need something to lighten up my Saturday:

Atheists' musings on morality lightweight

I've taken a section of interesting article on Atheist Morales by a Mark Milke of the Calgary Herald for you to read.

Religion by its nature asserts the existence of another realm beyond our physical world.

Dawkins would argue this belief, this imagining of another reality, is what lands us in trouble, and not just for understanding evolution but for life. Insofar as men and women try to live up to a code they think delivered by God, they might ignore the world they can see -- the real and only one according to the atheist.

But Dawkins creates a trap on another level. Atheist disbelief in another realm doesn't help defend morality in general or give atheists or anyone else a clue as to how to determine wrong and right.

I certainly don't agree that without a belief in the reward of heaven that I cannot stop myself from being a better person, but can we explain morals and how did we obtain them?

From an evolutionary stand point, human beings were able to overcome all the obstacles that occurred as the landscape changed between 1,000,000 years ago and modern day not just because our brain got bigger, but in those bigger brains, our emotional kinship with our fellow man had to heighten and flourish.

Those who didn't have our genetically enforced sense of morality or camaraderie to look after one another would surely have perished when humans moved through Africa, the Middle East, and Ice Aged Asia, Europe and Northern America, or over seas into Oceania and Australasia, and so wouldn't have passed on our their genes to another generation.

That's not to say that we should be perfect now because of genetics and natural selection should have removed any "selfish" genes, but it does allow us to understand why we are charitable to people we don't know, why we want to help when we see people suffering or that we do not need God to be good.

The use of fear in a mystical overlord works well when trying to get kids to behave quickly for personal reasons, but educating kids, and people, to be good for the good of humanity, society and the planet is ultimately going to make for a better society in the future.

In my humble opinion.

Anyway, the article is pretty good reading anyway, and I recommend taking a look at the full thing.

I'm not claiming atheists cannot be moral. Or that one should believe in God, or because without that, our moral language is unsupportable. Or even that atheists shouldn't use such language.

My observation is simply that despite his other insights, when Dawkins uses the language of morality, it carries little weight.

The language of morality used by an atheist is as artificial as the very realm which Dawkins claims is only in our imagination.

Read the Article