FacePalm of the Day #145 - Debunking Christianity: Morality 3: Of objectivity and oughtness

John Loftus has posted the 3rd video on series in which the video maker attempts to rescue atheist philosophy on morality from the abyss it has sunk into. It attempts to dodge the point that there are things that we know are wrong no matter what we may think about them and that we have moral obligations and responsibilities that we ought to live up to. Does this video does any better than the previous two? Nope.






Where to start? How about where it goes of the rails - the beginning - because there is a major flaw at the beginning throwing the whole video into FacePalm territory. The video says that people like William Lane Craig is wrong. The point is asserted that what a person thinks about what they are doing is not irrelevant as to if the action or thought is evil. It is stated that we don't hold consider a person evil if they don't know what they are doing is wrong. I disagree, but for the sake of this blog post, let's grant that and ask a couple of follow up questions: If a man kidnaps, rapes, tortures, and murders a little girl, is the action not evil if he did not know it was wrong? Was Hitler evil because he was responsible for the deaths of innocent millions in concentration camps? Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. If it's true that we don't condemn an action if the person does not think what they did was evil, then the only consistent thing you can do is to say that in both these instances no evil was committed. I don't think anyone sane would do that because we know that such actions are evil - no matter who does it or why they did it. Therefore you can't really take the arguments in this video seriously. There are things that are wrong. There are things that are right.

The thing is that the video fails to take into account is the fact that God's standard of morality is not the same as ours. The fact  is that there are things that He considers really evil that left to yourself you would not consider evil - things we rationalize and ignore, but we are still accountable. For example, in God's economy lust is just as harmful and sinful  and evil as adultery - even if it's never acted upon. We also tend to look down on people who commit things we think are evil and wrong but ignore the things we do. Things like gossip. Things like slander. Remember that God is not going to be judging us by our own relativistic I'm-good-but-you-are-a-piece-of-garbage standard by which we judge one another - but God will be judging us according to his own standard by which we are guilty and deserve hell. Do you want to be judged through Jesus or on your own?


Debunking Christianity: Morality 3: Of objectivity and oughtness