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4 comments

1 euphgeek  Thu, Jul 8, 2010 9:05:43am

Insane. People did bad things because they were atheists? I guess that explains why the majority of people in prison in the U.S. are Christians, doesn't it?

2 Michael McBacon  Thu, Jul 8, 2010 9:22:19am

I wonder what Mr. Daniels thinks of people like Yahweh ben Yahweh and Jim Jones...

3 cronus  Thu, Jul 8, 2010 10:04:55am

Daniels' answer is calculated to get him back in the good graces of the social conservatives he ran afoul of a couple weeks back when he stated that the next President should declare a "truce" on social issues.

4 lostlakehiker  Thu, Jul 8, 2010 11:14:06am
Daniels: I'm not sure it's all that new. People who reject the idea of a God -who think that we're just accidental protoplasm- have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications -which not all such folks have thought through- because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.

And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists -Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth- because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.

Everyone's certainly entitled in our country to equal treatment regardless of their opinion. But yes, I think that folks who believe they've come to that opinion ought to think very carefully, first of all, about how different it is from the American tradition; how it leads to a very different set of outcomes in the real world.


Daniels is in the unfortunate position that he does not understand, and cannot understand, atheist thinking about morality.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Universe is coldly indifferent to right and wrong, and that in life, the only thing that matters is winning. By any means necessary.

From that perspective, at first glance, altruism should be impossible. If the world were really truly made that way, there would be no such thing as altruistic behavior. At a minimum, altruistic behavior would be a kind of mental illness, something akin to Williams syndrome.

Certainly, altruism would be nonexistent in the animal kingdom. But this is wildly far off the mark. Ants are social creatures par excellance. And that's just one example among many. Across the board, we see animals helping out members of their own kin group or pack, even at substantial cost to themselves. The reason is that it turns out that winning has only to do with genes, and nothing directly to do with individuals. If a behavior serves to promote the survival and reproduction of a gene that codes for increased propensity to that behavior, that's all evolution asks. And sure enough, humans are most likely to sacrifice their own interests in favor of their own kin. But that's not the end of it. Pair-bonded mates are not themselves related. But they cooperate, and the Darwinian explanation is that such cooperation serves the interests of their offspring or offspring-to-be.

That's not the end of it either. Villages, tribes, corporations, and nations cooperate. The ability to scale cooperative behavior has proved adaptive. So now we come to Hitler. How did his nasty "power is the only thing that matters" behavior work out for the German Volk? Before he came to power, Germany was wracked by a depression, set back by the loss of the French province of Alsace [though genetically, that hardly mattered because genes don't care as long as the population continues as before], and the loss of a bit of territory in the East, the Danzig corridor.

After his act, his day on the stage, Germany was a smoking ruin from one end to the other, partitioned, with a substantial "habitat loss" associated with the cession of Prussia to Poland and Russia, and oh yes all those millions of war dead. Smooth move.

Brute violence simply doesn't pay. It gets you so far, and then it provokes the rest of the world. This same sort of story plays out on a smaller scale all the time. Gangsters strut, and then there's a gang war and they lose, or there's a civil war and they lose, or maybe once in a while they win but they drag their whole nation down.

The utterly selfish, amoral atheist, concerned only with winning, is an anomaly. Most people, atheists included, have a built in moral sense that guides them. Their default behavior is cooperative, because the genes that code a propensity to that default have won the brute struggle for survival.


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