Assigning Immorality to God

"The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense," Huckabee said. The United States is a "blessed" nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries' defeat of the British empire "a miracle from God's hand."

The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.

Voters "did it because some things are right and some things are wrong and they had to make a stand," said Huckabee….

(See: PilotOnline Huckabee, Gingrich urge political engagement in Va. Beach)

In my last post I wrote about Huckabee's rejection of the idea that all men are created equal and his attempt to replace it with the idea that God created the Huckabee Christians to be of a higher moral class than the rest of us.

In the same speech, Huckabee and Gingrich also argued that the passage of proposition 8 in California was a miracle engineered by God.

Actually, no. What actually happened in California is that a group of people tainted by evil managed to manipulate the population into getting their evil written into the law. They accomplished this, in part, by creating a God in their own image and assigning to this God all of their hatred and bigotry (created a God just as hateful and bigoted) in order to give their evil an illusion of legitimacy. That is how Proposition 8 got passed.

The fact that I call these people evil may strike some as a bit harsh. After all, these are people who care for their children, pay their taxes, help their neighbors in times of trouble, fight and die to defend their country. It is difficult to find a person who is truly evil to the core. When evil becomes mainstream, we can find it in a lot of our otherwise decent-seeming people put a lot of resources into doing harm to those who they have no ovreal-world reason to harm.

Yet, the same attributes can be assigned to many murderers and rapists. It was true of most of the slave owners in the pre-civil war South, and true of most Japanese and Nazi soldiers in World War II. It is true of many who are currently trying to find some way to kill American soldiers. In many aspects of their lives, they are good people. But they contain a moral flaw – an approval of slavery, racism, desires that are hurtful to others, a disregard for the welfare of strangers – that adds a taint of evil to their overall character.

Those who worked to pass Proposition 8 in California had a taint of evil. They then assigned their evil to God to create an illusion of legitimacy, and were sufficiently successful that they were able to infect the law itself with this same taint of evil.

Some might think it is odd for an atheist to speak about a taint of evil. Evil comes from God, or so some people say, and so an atheist can know nothing of evil.

Yet, to the believer, trees and mountains come from God as well. This does not prevent me from speaking about trees. I can still specify a great many facts about trees – their height, their mass, the way they convert sunlight, CO2, and H2O into food.

I can do the same thing with morality, If somebody says that morality comes from God, I can easily answer that the evil taint that comes from working so hard to deny others a chance at a happy union with someone they love comes from God. While I hold that the evil taint is found in a natural source – the reasons that people have to use condemnation to reduce the unjustified hostility people have to the peaceful happiness of others – the source does not matter. Only the content matters.

The content is that those who work hard to deprive others of an opportunity of a happy marriage to someone they love is tainted by evil.

Of course, I should add that the standard caveats that marriage unions like all forms of contract can only be mutually agreed upon by adults of sound mind. I should not have to add this – it is obvious – but hate-mongering bigots like to pretend (again, to give their evil an illusion of legitimacy) that defending gay marriage somehow nullifies this standard moral requirement.

This is another symptom of the evil taint I wrote about above. No decent person would make such an absurd inference – only those in desperate need to give their hate an illusion of legitimacy would engage in such distortions.

It is depressing to see the lengths that those who are filled with hate may go to give hate-motivated actions the illusion of legitimacy. Drawing make-believe inferences and assigning their hate to God and saying that God also has the same prejudices and hatreds are only two examples.

Yes, I know that the perpetrators of this scam do not call the attitudes they assign to God ‘hate’. However, changing its name does not change what it is.