Atheism: Religion in Disguise
Today as I was browsing Hulu I came across the following clip from Nightline. It focuses on a central character in the growing movement of vocal atheists – one who’s not at all afraid to mock those of differing beliefs.
Now if I were an atheist I’d probably be fairly upset with this bit of reporting by Nightline, mainly because it does come across as biased toward religion by focusing on a character (Edwin Kagin) whose methods of anti-evangelism are hard to distinguish from the fire-and-brimstone religious evangelists he’s trying to mock. It’s by no means a thorough or fair treatment of the deeper discussions which divide atheists from theists, and really just makes this group of atheists look silly. Still, the interview with him brought up some important distinctions, among them the fact that a moral argument (which many modern atheists are trying to use against religion) is nonsense: there are “good” and “bad” believers and unbelievers. The fact that atheists like Stalin do not represent the larger body of unbelievers is no different than the fact that medieval crusaders do not represent the example of Christ nor the theology of Christians. And of course, an atheist making a moral argument is itself a bit ridiculous: their belief system denies moral absolutism. To a true naturalist, right and wrong are at most subjective conventions, and at their core nothing more than natural selections toward iterative improvement, where the end justifies the means.
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