I hear these comments for not wanting to help people, and it feels like we’re worshipping individuality to the detriment of community, which is necessary for survival.
- “I don’t want my money going to ___ .”
- “This is not a democracy, it’s a constitutional republic!”
- “You don’t have any freedoms under socialism/communism.”
- “They’re just looking for a handout because they’re lazy.”
- “I’m a self-made man. I didn’t need anyone’s help.”
- “Empathy is not a virtue.”
- “I don’t see how that’s my problem.”
… wut.
If anything, Atheism is the way forward.
Atheism is no way, it’s intellectually lazy, and cowardly fence-sitting that leads to/reinforces hedonistic nihilism and moral relativism. It’s just noticeably more internally consistent than Roman Catholicism and its trinitarian offshoots, but that’s like never dating again because your middle school boyfriend was mean… Atheism is the way like suicide is, and mostly something fall into by default, or emotional pain, or the need to feel unwatched and unaccountable so one can do nonsense, not some sort of “transcendental wisdom” that Europe came up with, lol. Even for Nietzsche, this is a tragedy (because he’s not a dummy!) without precedent, and something that needs to be corrected ASAP. If God is dead in the West, something needs to fill the God-shaped hole. Ideally, it’s God, but evidently it hasn’t been for ages (if some form of righteous monotheism even “trickled down” from Roman Catholicism to begin with!) and the results in their societies (amoral and selfish “get the bag” mentality, sexual depravity that’s applauded and openly talked about and taken as virtue/lightly, people living by inertia and for pleasure because they have no purpose nor do they even care to think about it, the “loneliness epidemic”, etc etc.) are very noticeable.
I think believing things without evidence is intellectually lazy. Atheism is the default position. I only believe in one less god than you.
What is the “evidence” behind moral stances?
For me it’s at least partially based on mutual aid, something that we also see in nature. Helping other people helps me (and the entire species as a whole).
That said, I’m not sure why you’re so convinced that morals need to be based on anything. I have empathy, that means I don’t want harm to come to others. It’s really that simple.
Sorry, the absence of god isn’t a hole. It means being a moral person for rational reasons and not because some author of a fairy tale, who also say things like “it’s cool to kill some people”, said so. Even if it ‘was a hole’, filling it with proper education is far superior in all respects.
Edit: and this is the first time I’ve seen someone argue that following a religion is NOT the intellectually lazy thing to do. Amazing.
You can’t science/big brain yourself into morals, you either believe in it or not (again, check Hume’s fork and the is-ought problem, the wise men in your tribe already talked about this!). And it’s not about believing in tales, but finding yourself in/agreeing the words of the prophets (like their moral lessons) enough that you start considering the background ideology of what they’re saying and then one day you’re a well-read God fearing man.