Another victory for the Sanctity of Life crowd

His clinic had been bombed, and he had been shot before. He was not pursued by just a single nutcase, but a community of people who felt he was violating God's law by providing pregnant women with the right to choose to terminate their pregnancies. So they finally got Dr. George Tiller. He was gunned down in his church--worshiping the same God as the murderer. Those who believe in the sanctity of life can breathe a sigh of relief now. Killers know that they will be punished by the righteous.

President Obama is wrong to excuse torturers

I make no secret of the fact that I have been a strong supporter of Barack Obama, yet I have no sympathy whatsoever with his policy of excusing low level torturers. I understand political expediency. If we tell government servants that they have to question their orders, then that can make for some really difficult problems for those who try to implement policies. There have to be clear lines of authority and responsibility. That is precisely why all of the Nazis that the Allies prosecuted at Nuremburg should have been let go and had their pensions restored. Or did the victors make the right decision in prosecuting war crimes?

Forget the higher ups. It is precisely the foot soldiers--those who waterboarded and confined prisoners in boxes with insects and slammed prisoners against walls and forced prisoners to maintain painful postures for hours and all the rest--who ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Not Dick Cheney. His day in court will come eventually. Start with the little guys. Throw the book at them. They were precisely the ones who should have been questioning those orders and quitting their jobs. They were the people who stood to suffer for disobeying orders, and they were the people who should NOT be told that it was ok to do what they were told. If we don't get those guys to balk at authority, then there will always be people in authority who will not hesitate to use their complicity. They are individual human beings who are responsible for their behavior. Like anyone caught in a moral dilemma, they did not deserve to be put in the position of becoming a party to atrocious behavior. But they were caught in a train wreck that has happened all too often in human history. And, if history means anything, it is only the little people who can put a stop to the monsters that rule over them. I say throw the book at them. Show mercy when they turn state's evidence, but don't let them off the hook completely. We have to set a precedent that individuals are responsible for the choices they make, even if those choices are tough.

What if God Disappeared?

Here are some very common arguments against atheism on YouTube. How many times have we heard these? Enjoy.

In Defense of Robots

Theists sometimes argue free will theodicy--that God permits evil in order that we might choose to obey his will freely. There is a part of this argument that I have never fully understood, and it is that for God to intervene directly in our choices would make us all into "robots"--beings incapable of making free choices, let alone moral choices. I have a couple of serious problems with this argument:

• Robots can be programmed to make free choices in principle.
• Our choices already appear to be determined by physical events inside our brains. That is, we are essentially flesh-and-blood robots.

Mainly, though, I just don't understand why God's presence would somehow affect our ability to choose to disobey him any more than a child is robbed of free will by the presence of his or her parent. As we all know, kids can choose to disobey even when the parent is glaring at them and muttering angry noises.

As for robots and morality, I leave you with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In fact, Asimov worked out ways in which robots could violate #1. They can behave just like Christians who go to war and kill, even though God commands that they not kill. There is always the "greater good" to motivate evil.

Why I fear religion-based morality

Religion-based morality is usually grounded in the authority of a god, although there can be a more dispersed basis for that authority, as there seems to be in some Eastern religious traditions. From a Christian perspective, right and wrong conduct is fully determined by God. Without God's authority to motivate conduct, people can misbehave in any conceivable way without fear of punishment or loss of reward for good behavior. God figures heavily in their calculation of the best course of action in the future.

When confronted with an atheist, people of religious faith are understandably concerned. They now face someone whose basis for morality is largely missing. Such a person would seem to pose a worse threat to society than someone who accepts the existence of a clear moral authority and just chooses to disobey. The atheist has no guide to correct behavior except, perhaps, an intuitive understanding of what God ordains, and that is just not enough. The atheist faces no threat from disobedience other than social condemnation.

Now let me explain my perspective on morality as an atheist. The threat I face for immoral conduct is not just social, but we all face the penalty of social condemnation. I also face a personal psychological threat that is roughly the same as for the religionist. Moral rules are more like ethical rules in the sense that they are based on convention and principle. It is possible that my instinctive feelings of guilt, often based largely on empathy for others, were designed into me by a deity, but I really doubt that. More likely, they derive from the evolutionary process that created human beings as social animals. I want others to like me, and that is a powerful check on behavior. I also feel pressure to conform to social norms, even though I cannot always make sense of them on the basis of empathy or principle (e.g. "Do unto others...") I recognize instinctively that moral conduct makes me safer because it strengthens the social bonds that I depend on for comfort and survival. So there is a rational basis for moral behavior. Even though a god is not going to destroy me for misbehaving, I could lose standing in my community and self-esteem.

Now I will explain my problem with religious morality--why it concerns me that people ground morality in the authority of a deity. Gods can be capricious. They do not always have the best interests of humanity as a whole in mind. For example, some believers believe their deity wants their religious doctrine to be valued above survival and comfort. Sometimes religious law is harsh and cruel, but it is thought justified on the basis of how the deity feels about the behavior in question. That disturbs me because I regard gods (and supernaturalism in general) as grounded in pure imagination, not reality. Whether or not there is any truth to supernaturalism, it seems that people's beliefs about the supernatural can vary arbitrarily. So the moral grounding of a religious person has an element of arbitrariness that frightens me. Divine authority trumps all other authority, and it can contravene social welfare in general.

So we come full circle. I understand why people of religious faith question the basis of my morality and why they consider atheism a threat to social safety. I also see religion-based morality as a potential threat to human safety, although usually it is the case that people imagine their gods to want the same thing they do--safety and comfort for the human race.