| | | slarrow August 01, 2015 5:14 PM Atheists make this mistake all the time. They think they can borrow wholesale the moral precepts from Christianity while denying its foundational truths. Christopher Hitchens was especially bad (and dishonest) on this front. He always pretended that his opponents were claiming that atheists couldn't be moral. They can, but they have to steal their moral precepts and can't ground them on their own principles. Ultimately, they have little more than sentiment and indignation to bolster their beliefs. That works in English and journalism classes, sadly, but an elementary logic course should rip them to shreds.
This is another manifestation of what I've seen referred to as the "cut flowers thesis." This quote from Tolstoy describes it thusly:
"The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower."
A bouquet of flowers is beautiful, but ultimately, it is dead. |
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