By Todd Pearson
Spring Valley, MN
It was with great interest that I read your commentary from June 25. I found your work engaging but lacking in explaining atheism. In your opening paragraph you wrote, “there is a severe misunderstanding among some county residents about others.” There are thousands of residents in this county that misunderstand thousands of others. This has no bearing on the subject. Human beings are possessed of fallible faculties that lead to misunderstanding; sadly unavoidable. I am a Christian, but don’t blend in with “Christian Culture.” The reality is that Christianity is cultural; not a lifestyle or commitment for most who call themselves Christian. The current climate of “American Christianity” has become westernized and bears little likeness to the early Church or churches that sprang from the Reformation. This is a result of Therapeutic Moralistic Deism. It means that calling yourself a Christian makes you okay with God. This results in functionally atheistic Christians. Is this important? Yes. It helps us to understand the great divide between our views. You wrote, “Atheism has no dogmas. Atheism has no creed. Atheism has no tenet.” What you didn’t recognize is that is actually a creed. A creed is a set of aims which guide someone’s actions. To have made the quoted statement you must be dogmatic that atheism has no dogmas, creeds or tenets. Furthermore for your statement to have any semblance of truth many atheists must adhere to it. This defeats the statement in context. I am reminded of many Christians I experience in my daily life; they often say that they also are not dogmatic about their beliefs. You go on to list all of the ways that atheists differ from one another. These anecdotal statements are not support for your argument; they are observations of the human condition. You could find Christians in many of those examples as well. That doesn’t validate my argument; nor does it validate yours. I am saddened that professing Christians make claims that atheists have no moral compass. I have heard this often. As orthodox and conservative as I am in my doctrine, I disagree with any Christian that would say atheist have no moral compass. Because of my orthodox doctrine I know for a fact that atheists do possess a moral compass. Most atheists follow some variation of what atheist philosopher Stefan Molnyeux refers to as Universally Preferable Behavior. Atheists often refer to societal mores for their definition of what is good or evil (if they acknowledge evil). The problem with this is that society is fickle. What society calls good today can change rapidly. Lest we forget, it was societal values that led to the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide the Trail of Tears and scores of other tragedies; not the least of which is the American Genocide, that has caused the murder of almost 61,000,000 pre-born babies in the USA. Societal values are shifting constantly. This is not a foundation that one can base their moral compass upon. As a point of illustration; the American Psychiatric Association as recently as 2013 decided to make shifts in how pedophilia is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The APA wants to draw a line between those pedophiles that actually want to act on their urges and those who do not. In short, what I am saying is that while I would never accuse any atheist I have met of having no moral compass, I would tell you that your moral compass must be taken from the Christian world view. You know good from evil when you encounter it because Scripture says in Romans 2 “God has written His law on your heart.” While your assertion may be that atheists do not need God to be good people; you simply cannot define what is good without borrowing from the Christian world view. The Christian world view is possessed of an external objective eternal moral source that defines good and evil. The atheistic worldview, if taken to its most logical end, is based on subjective shifting societal emotions. If the common atheistic assertion is true that we are only bags of stardust, then atheists have no foundations for the moral compass that they possess.
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