Bless me non-existent father, for I have sinned.
I'm an atheist who has more in common with the theists than with my fellow atheists. I don't know how this happened. On the issues of sex, drinking, drugs, partying, piracy, almost everything of a moral basis, I consistently side closer to the theist perspectives than the liberal atheist perspective. I find sex to be something which should be shared between devoted (even if unwed) partners, rather than something to be done recreationally. But, the nail in the coffin was this article:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YTk5NGFjOTY3YjFmYmIxNzY3NThmMWJjNTU3O%20TMyMTM
As I read it, I found myself agreeing with the woman writing it. She's a conservative Catholic, and I'm agreeing with her wholeheartedly. No college should be encouraging co-habitation between strangers of opposite genders, and no student should be requesting it. I have no reason for this belief (no theism to fall back on, and no secular logic to defend it).
It feels like many people in my general belief group of atheism have taken the belief in moral relativism (since there is no higher moral law) far further than I'm comfortable with. Don't get me wrong, I have decided problems with religion as well, but it's the atheists who have been raising my ire most recently. There's nothing any more righteous about refusing theist morality than accepting it, just a different set of choices. It may be more logical, more existential, more empirical, but that's not more righteous. The entire point of human society is to prioritize some behaviors as being good, and list some as being bad. No matter what basis we use for that listing, the schema will always be a moral one. We will always have to choose whose rights to suppress, and whose to protect, based on which rights we believe (morally/ethically) to be more important.
Maybe it's an issue of who I know, but most of the atheists (and especially agnostics) I know are the people going around drinking (especially underage), partying, doing drugs, and having promiscuous sex.
I'm rambling a bit, it's pretty late, but what are people's thoughts? Am I simply in a poor area, or have other people noticed this kind of wholesale rejection of societal rules and ethics by atheists? Do other people think we're pushing too far in the opposite direction? Is it just that I (even as an atheist) prefer order to chaos?
I'm an atheist who has more in common with the theists than with my fellow atheists. I don't know how this happened. On the issues of sex, drinking, drugs, partying, piracy, almost everything of a moral basis, I consistently side closer to the theist perspectives than the liberal atheist perspective. I find sex to be something which should be shared between devoted (even if unwed) partners, rather than something to be done recreationally. But, the nail in the coffin was this article:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YTk5NGFjOTY3YjFmYmIxNzY3NThmMWJjNTU3O%20TMyMTM
As I read it, I found myself agreeing with the woman writing it. She's a conservative Catholic, and I'm agreeing with her wholeheartedly. No college should be encouraging co-habitation between strangers of opposite genders, and no student should be requesting it. I have no reason for this belief (no theism to fall back on, and no secular logic to defend it).
It feels like many people in my general belief group of atheism have taken the belief in moral relativism (since there is no higher moral law) far further than I'm comfortable with. Don't get me wrong, I have decided problems with religion as well, but it's the atheists who have been raising my ire most recently. There's nothing any more righteous about refusing theist morality than accepting it, just a different set of choices. It may be more logical, more existential, more empirical, but that's not more righteous. The entire point of human society is to prioritize some behaviors as being good, and list some as being bad. No matter what basis we use for that listing, the schema will always be a moral one. We will always have to choose whose rights to suppress, and whose to protect, based on which rights we believe (morally/ethically) to be more important.
Maybe it's an issue of who I know, but most of the atheists (and especially agnostics) I know are the people going around drinking (especially underage), partying, doing drugs, and having promiscuous sex.
I'm rambling a bit, it's pretty late, but what are people's thoughts? Am I simply in a poor area, or have other people noticed this kind of wholesale rejection of societal rules and ethics by atheists? Do other people think we're pushing too far in the opposite direction? Is it just that I (even as an atheist) prefer order to chaos?
