Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Religion & War - Dr. Ravi Zacharias claims atheism has caused more death than religion.
How is killing in violation of Christianity? The Christian holy-book is filled with murder...well, Christians don't like to refer to it as "murder" ('justifying killings' sound much better). This guy doesn't understand that atheism is not a belief system, a morality, or a standard of ethics. Atheism is the non-belief in a god/gods and nothing more.
Besides, for those that actually read the bible, without personal bias, will see real quick how nasty its message is. The bible on one hand brings out the worst in human nature, and on the other, points out the obvious (e.g. murder and stealing are wrong). Atheism has no scripture, or any sort of thing like that, that is what this guy doesn't seem to understand. Atheism didn't motivate Stalin to do what he did. What this guy is saying is as ridiculous as me me saying that Osama Bin Ladin did what he did because of his lack of belief in astrology. It takes a certain belief system to motivate someone to do evil; a lack of a belief has never caused evil, but it certainly can get in its way.
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I have not watched the above video of Dr. Zacharias, but I can tell from the statements you are making that regardless of what you might think in the matter, atheism is a faith position.
ReplyDeleteAtheists, until recent times, have had no means by which to either confirm or deny God's existence. There has emerged the science of Applied Kinesiology (not to be confused with Kinesiology) that has been able to confirm the fundamental truths of the major faiths throughout history with objective, verifiable and blind-tested clinical data.
The point is that this lack of belief in a higher authority removes the fundamental absolutes that are taken for granted in our belief systems. When looking at atheism and logical thought as the saner recourse for living our lives, we have come out of a Western culturally defined value system that we operate from which dictates our beliefs anyways. People living in the majority of the Western world would think that certain things are wrong.
As is plainly obvious by the wide range of different thoughts on certain aspects of life and behaviors what the Western world takes as a given for "right" and "wrong" are merely ingrained cultural values - a culture, I might add, that is fundamentally founded on the principals of Christianity as it was birthed from a society of Christian adherents, so I don't believe that your argument holds much merit. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, your system of values and what you might consider "right" and "wrong" would be entirely different, regardless of whether you were atheist or not...
And if you propose that, as you've said, "a lack of a belief has never caused evil, but it certainly can get in its way" then you contradict yourself by mentioning Stalin. His lines of thought, based on logical arguments, that involve removing the ideas of faith and and moral absolutes are what he used to give himself permission to justify the horrific acts that he perpetrated - Stalin was at one point a Seminary student.
You cannot, from the position you've chosen, really look at anything that would be considered an atrocity by our cultural standards and say that it is wrong if it is based on the flow-through of sound logical arguments. You may disagree with them, but in the absence of absolutes which dictate these values, these are merely your personal feelings on the matter. If you argue to the contrary, then where do you set the standard of "right" and "wrong" from? Who gives you the framework for the absolutes of morality that you hold to? Not logic... Not atheism... What then? An ingrained sense of what is best? Where does that come from?
History has certainly shown that human nature is definitely not the source of our moral sensitivities... What is the source?