In December 2014, over 2,800 atheists responded to a challenge to rewrite the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with modern, humanist alternatives. After collating and condensing the submissions, thirteen judges voted on the top ten atheist Ten Commandments – or perhaps to avoid the hierarchical implications of the word, we ought to call them Suggestments. I would like to offer a few, brief observations to this list, which aren’t so much chiseled into immutable stone as they are finger-sketched into the sand at low tide. The original CNN article can be found here.
God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life
To say a person is good or bad implies a moral law to differentiate between the two. To have a moral law implies a lawgiver outside the system to provide objective standards – precisely the entity not believed to exist. To deny the Lawgiver is to deny an objective moral law, which is to dissolve any meaningful difference between good and bad. Any moral categories humans erect are arbitrary products of biological and social evolution, held in place by some invisible social contract no one remembers having signed.
This is not to say that any atheist, chosen at random, is not or cannot be moral or even more moral by comparison to a theist. It just means no account of this morality can be provided that is anything other than subjective. A brief walk through the twentieth century, however, shows the incredible body count of specifically atheistic regimes, where Moa’s China and Stalin’s Russia combined killed 80 – 100 million of their own civilians, simultaneously snuffing out any flicker of religious life. If humans do not bear the divine image, they are just meat puppets who get in the way and preeminently biodegradable.
Dissecting the moral code of 21st century, Western atheists would reveal a morality remarkably like that of the Christian value system. This is because it is precisely the body of Christianity but with the heart removed. Due process, freedom of speech and religion, and the sanctity of life, etc, all stem from Christian philosophy.
The morality that many have adopted and come to love is the same Richard Dawkins (atheist) expressed tenderness towards when he said, “I call myself a cultural Christian, I’m not a believer. . . I do not believe in a single word of Christian faith.” The wild briers of human morality were pruned by Christianity into a productive vineyard, and he gets drunk on the wine while denying the vinedresser. He loves the grapes but hates the vineyard.
A meaningful life is, according to atheist and existentialist Albert Camus, “whatever happens to prevent one, in any given moment, from killing themselves.” If there is any meaning to be gleaned at all from atheist materialism it would be the stubborn insistence of DNA. We are the fleshy seed pods for our DNA to make more of itself. Any and all subsequent meaning we may fabricate is the story we tell to make the bleak reality of Darwin more palatable.
Thought Butter 