A view of right and wrong, good and evil, in a universe without gods.
I am away from my blog for a couple of weeks. This is an experiment in posting some conversation topics while I am gone.
The two questions to answer relevant to the statement below is are:
• Is it true?
• Is it important?
(11) There is not a single evil done 'in the name of God' for which a person cannot find a secular justification (rationalization) that makes no mention of God.
Posted by
Alonzo Fyfe
at
5:00 AM
By request, I have written some of the basic principles of the desire utilitarian moral theory that sits as the foundation for these blog postings into a book called, A Better Place: Selected Essays in Desire Utilitarianism.
In a previous post, I wrote a detailed account of the contents of the book.
4 comments:
This is only true for very loose definitions of "justification". I can justify anything by saying "because I wanted to". So, yeah. I guess it's true in that sense.
Hiya Kip. Totally disagree. Humans are great at rationalization, and the smarter they are the better they get at it. People have come up with justifications for killing those with different political views purely for secular reasons. Shouldn't be hard at all to find a justification for any action that doesn't involve any god.
And I agree that it's important because it means that simply stopping religion will not stop human evil. It therefore also implies that stopping religion should not be the primary goal.
It is a true statement in my opinion. Neither secularists as a whole nor religionists as a whole are devoid of good actions / behavior nor wicked actions / behavior.
I say true due human irrationality.
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