Godless Delusion?

Some conservative Bruce Walker wrote some crazy rant entitled the Godless Delusion for, among other places, the conservative online magazine American Thinker. The title and subsequent perusal of the magazine makes one wonder is apathetic ignorance a better state of mind for Americans than this sort of thinking? Frightening, but I digress. I call it a crazy rant because it doesn't try to prove anything but rather just spews non sequitors, logical fallacies, and unfounded assertions of christian propaganda.

To give credit where credit is due, he starts off well by saying, "There is evil in the world because people choose evil.  Each of us has a conscience.  We instinctively know what is right and wrong." Bravo! That's something many have been challenging christians on for some time. I've touched on it before commenting on ramifications of experiments showing mammalian altruism, Christopher Hitchens responded to the attack that atheists can't comprehend good and evil by Michael Gerson, and there have been countless arguments made to dispel this myth from George Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God all the way back to at least Epicurius and his famous questions
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Yet still we're plagued by the christian assertion. So great, here's a right-winger saying we "instinctively know what is right and wrong". So far so good. However, that's where if you want a sound article you'd have to stop reading because it's downhill fast from there.

He goes on to write, "The source of evil may be identified as the Devil, but it is more precisely a rejection of God.  When God is at the center of our lives, then evil is not." Well evil may be identified as my ass after a day of wings and beer or more seriously as exploiting your authority to rape children, but to say it's the Devil or a rejection of the christian god sounds as ridiculous as Kathy Bates did in The Waterboy. In fact, I think she made more sense because despite how silly her reasons were for declaring something "the devil" and therefore evil, she at least gave reasons. Mr. Walker here merely makes an unfounded assertion. What follows next is summarily going down the list of christian propaganda. First there's asserting Atheism is a religion, followed by how christianity is better than the other religions of Aztecs (wait, didn't Conquistadors have the blessing of the church when they killed millions in Peru alone, not to mention the atrocities in the rest of South and Central America?) and Asians and of course, to unknowingly prove Godwin's Law, he brings up the Nazis and then those godless Communists. The latter being a foundation of modern christian propaganda despite being trounced time and again.

His further "proof" that christianity is better is "Almost every single movement or belief which we now consider good originated in Christianity or Judaism. Abolitionism, prison reform, compassion for animals, equality before the law, medical science, systematic intellectual inquiry - nearly everything - traces back to a Christian or a Jew." I don't know what makes me laugh harder, the ridiculousness of making these assertions or the individual assertions themselves. Abolitionism? Really? You're going to go with that when slavery was justified with the bible? When the bible, rather than say slavery is bad (that would have been a great commandment, perhaps in place of one of the several that say the same thing already, that you can't have any other gods since, apparently, the christian god is a VERY insecure and jealous bitch), actually tells you how you can beat them? Equality before the law? Yes, if you're not a woman, or gay or an insolent child or maybe black. Maybe the most laughable is "systematic intellectual inquiry". Really? So why is science so bad then and resisted by the church throughout history? Oh wait, he gets to that later.

The wheels REALLY come off the wagon and it goes tumbling down nonsense hill into crazy valley next. There's the praise of the concept of sin and the process of repentance and renewal which is supposedly something that makes them live moral lives. The concept is fundamentally flawed. For instance, if Dick hurts Jane and then asks for forgiveness from god, how does this help Jane? Where's her justice? This isn't morality, this is how to make yourself feel better and erase that annoying guilt of conscience that we all, as Walker admits, instinctively have. So this concept of being able to rationalize and do away with our guilt without properly having to pay for our crimes nor make any attempt at restitution to those we hurt is a moral life that he claims makes jews and christians "the best people on Earth".

Then there's science. Remember when he said christianity made possible "systematic intellectual inquiry" possible? Well ironically, science seems to be a bad thing. The limits of our ability to know he claims are set by his god (why? well knowing stuff I guess is bad so the big guy created road blocks), says science is a religion, and goes on to say "knowing much beyond what we already know about the universe is increasingly improbable" but that's ok since "no serious person today can think that material benefits will make us happier". So thanks christianity for giving us systematic intellectual inquiry but hey, there are limits to how much we can know, god limits how much we can know, we already know about as much as we can ever know and really, what would more advances give us? According to Mr. Walker, the advances we have today have just made us obese, bored, and into horrific, and perverse entertainment (plus some occasional dabbling in violence, promiscuous sex and drugs).

How someone can start off so well and then fall so hard and so fast is beyond me, but Mr. Walker does just that. I'm guessing he created the title first and then started typing some flow of consciousness crap since never once did he look back at the title and make an attempt to prove being godless is a delusion. I'd say he even failed at giving any reasons why being godless is bad or less desirable than being god fearing, let alone christian. I can only hope that one day he shrugs off his own delusions, the ones that prevent him from recognizing what we "instinctively know what is right and wrong", and live a healthy, happy and truly moral life.