"Lawrence Hyde" <revolutionarian@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:f925918f.0403261417.5e1841c9@posting.google.com...
Sure "atheist"- "without God"- quite logical. However, a lot of good
people proclaim faith in God as a show of acceptance of the standards
of morality and ethics that are associated with God. So, the negative
connotation of the label "atheist" is that we are likewise "without
standards of morals and ethics"
The trouble is, it's a false connotation, the result of an all too
common logical fallacy known as "denying the antecedent" (of a
conditional statement). While some people may engage in moral behavior
because they believe in a god and associate morality with that belief,
it does *not* follow that others, who do not believe in a god and who
associate morality with something else, are not moral.
To illustrate what's wrong with "denying the antecedent," consider the
statement, "Christians are religious, so non-Christians are not
religious." While it happens that some non-Christians (e.g., atheists)
are not religious, the fact that around 3 billion Buddhists, Hindus,
Jews, Muslims, Shintoists, Sikhs, and others are both religious and
non-Christian amply demonstrates that the statement is false, and that
such a form is fallacious.
Most religious people are coached, from toddler-hood on, in the dogma
that all morality springs from a divine source. Many are so
indoctrinated in this notion that they cannot conceive of any other
possibility. But the fact remains that lots of people who don't believe
in gods live scrupulously and consistently "moral" (or more accurately
in most cases, "ethical') lives. That is to say, they have *other
reasons* for conducting themselves morally, entirely irrespective of
superstitious dread of temperamental spirits smiting them with
thunderbolts or casting them into flaming pits.
Indeed, let's consider the truism that morality is virtue. We might
well note that someone, who exhibits socially acceptable behavior only
because he fears terrible punishment if he doesn't, is not truly moral.
He is merely afraid. Where's the virtue in that?
--
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