Notes from Evil Bender

Okay, so he only said he’d kill children if he was convinced God told him to do so. Now this is really no surprise from such a bigoted asshat. But it does illustrate nicely a point I’ve made again and again in this space: if you accept a morality based on God’s say-so, then there is nothing you wouldn’t do if you believed strongly enough that God told you to do it.

When someone murders his family because they are infected by demons, we may call them mad and we certainly would call them a killer. When Saul murdered the Amalekites (as Vox mentions) it was the actions of a (for that moment, anyway) righteous man.

More after the fold.

So what separates right action from a horrible crime against humanity? Well, if one believes (really believes) that God is communicating directly with you and you let that communication form your morality, then the only thing keeping that person in line is that they believe God wants them to be good. But if morality is a function of the Almighty’s will, then there is literally no way to make a moral argument against atrocities, except for the “God didn’t say to do that” argument, which is of course completely circular.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not implying that all religious people are potential killers. Obviously most religious folks–like most people in general–go about their days trying to be decent people and knowing that things like murder are wrong without God having to say so. But this just proves my point: they think murder is wrong because they believe there is a fixed standard of right action which one can evaluate on its face. That is, they believe there are good reasons to act ethically (even if they never articulate this belief).

On the other hand, the Vox Days, the suicide bombers, the mass murderers and the war mongerers of this world think something very different: they think not that God commands certain actions because they are right, but that actions are right because God commanded them. Plato saw exactly this trap, but millions of “religious” people still miss it. If things are right based on God’s say-so, then we have no assurance that the rules will change. In fact, if we’re trying to follow the Judeo-Christian God, then we know the rules will change. How else could the God that commanded us not to kill order anyone to exterminate men, women, and children–to commit acts of genocide?

Now this is not the death-knell for belief in God, but it is a perfect example of why this kind of thinking is dangerous and must be opposed at every turn. Once we except God’s–or any authority figure’s–say-so about what we must do, and leave aside our own judgement, there is nothing to protect us from committing atrocities, because we are deliberately suppressing our own moral sense.

If we accept another proposition, though, namely that there exists a moral standard that does not come from anyone’s say-so, but rather is rationally accessible to people who try to act rightly (a standard such as the golden rule, however we may formulate it), then we at least have a safety net, a way of avoiding the trap of absolute conviction.

Does this mean you need to believe in God to commit evil? Of course not. But it means that we must not build morality on anyone’s say-so. If you believe in God, then believe that he would want us to carefully consider morality, not simply blindly accept us what a priest or text or invisible voice tells us is right and wrong. Surely a good God would not give us brains and demand we ignore them.

Or we can take the Vox Day route, and freely admit that we’d be perfectly happy to do something anyone can see is wrong because God told us to do so. Then we end up with stupidity like this:

Now, I admit that if I was wrong and my god did not exist but another one did, one of his worshippers could likely provide a rational reason for why I it would be immoral to embark upon a toddler-slaying rampage. Of course, that would depend on the moral code of that other deity. And then, a Christian could certainly call into question the legitimacy of my divine orders; I’m quite sure that every Christian of my acquaintance would, in fact, do so.

Things are right because God says so, but if the God who says so violates what I think God said (in this case, kill babies) then that God must be wrong.

Vox is violating his own rules. Despite his warped moral sense, he still knows that reasonable people should disobey obviously immoral orders, but he wants to make a caveat: those orders are okay if they come from the God I think I hear.

No, Vox, they aren’t. And if you’d like anyone to believe there is any distinction between your “morality” and the morality of those who fly planes into buildings, you’d better figure that out in a hurry.