Evo said:
I guess my point is that atheists are good because they want to do good, not because they fear supernatural punishment. I am tired of the "atheists can't have morals because they don't believe in a particular religion". If I have mistaken what you were saying, I apologize.
I was not all offended or even piqued. No apology needed.
I should have elaborated.
Here are some examples.
-The movie Roots portrays Africans living in a state of harmony and love until their natural society is uprooted by slave traders who for profit violate man's nature by preventing him from persuing his natural inclination to live peacefully and in harmony with his fellow men. Slavery violates man's Nature and therefore his natural rights.
- I the Renaissance, philosophers thought that all creatures other than man had an intrinsic Nature that dictated their behavior. The swallowtail drinks nectar from a flower. The eagle snares the prairie dog in its talons and returns to its aerie with food for its chicks. The praying mantis eats is mate after copulation. All of these behaviors are Natural/intrinsic. The natural right of these creatures would be to live as there nature guides them. So the swallowtail would have its flower. The eagle would be able to live free in a world of high ledges and rolling prairies. This concept of natural rights, in my mind, is the ethical foundation of environmentalism.
Man on the other hand was viewed as having no fixed Nature but rather could be anything that he chose to be. He could be a carrion eater or slave trader or a philosopher. Man's intrinsic Nature was only the ability of free choice to become whatever he chose to be. For the Renaissance philosopher this was what it was meant when it was said that man was created in the image of God. From this point of view man's natural right would be the right to pursue his natural inclination for free choice. Interestingly, this mean that rather than living unattended in a fixed ecological niche like the butterfly, man through society would be encouraged to enhance his ability to to make free choices and to become (pardon the expression) more like God. This leads to a complicated question of when man's behavior becomes repetitive and unfree, thereby unnatural - e.g. drug addiction or adherence to a religious dogma - and what society needs to do to guide him away from these animal like behavioral traps without removing his ability to make his own choices.
- My father was a professional Communist and therefore an Atheist. His view of man's Nature was that man was completely shaped by the "material conditions of life" as he would put it so that even though man was pliable and had no fixed Nature, he also did not have a true ability of free choice. He was more a piece of clay molded by social conditions. Marxist morality derives from this view of man. Society as an evolving series of stages shapes man completely and therefore it is society that is fundamental and has natural rights. For instance since Capitalism was internally contradictory and carried the seeds of inevitable self-destruction it was the right of society to pass out of capitalism and into communism. Man's only moral choice was to abet this process. It was immoral to cling to capitalist social forms and societies that protected capitalism from natural transition were evil. This was why Communists were the first people to oppose Fascism.
- My good friend Carey believes that man is intrinsically vicious, by Nature evil, because by some awful quirk of biological evolution he became the self- contradictory creature that destroys everything in his path - including himself - in order to survive. He eradicates the natural rights of all other living creatures by wiping out their environments, and persecutes himself by wars, by mean and horrible behavior towards his fellows.Her view and moral idea was that violation of all other creature's nature by this malignant prodigy known as man had to be stopped. She believes that mankind's only moral choice is to wipe himself out and leave the stage of life forever and let all of the other non-pathological forms of life pursue their Nature in peace.`
Interestingly, she thinks that there is evidence of this viciousness in our evolutionary brothers, the Chimpanzees, who behave ,in her mind, much like humans. She points to the example of the alpha male that bites off the face of a baby male chimp that might some day compete with him for dominance.
- Nazi philosophers e.g. Otto Rahn believed that the Arians had been deprived of their Natural state of supernatural Godliness by Christianity which they considered to be a fundamentally Hebraic dogma. To them the Judeo-Christian culture was propagated militarily by the Roman Empire in its latter centuries and later after the fall of Rome, by descendants of patrician Roman families and in doing so, committed genocide against the Arian people and their culture - their sacred places, and their spirit, and disconnected them of their Nature as semi-gods - or supermen if you like. For them this justified destroying the the Judeo-Christian world entirely. It is fascinating to read Otto Rahn's book where he searches Europe in a long SS funded odyssey to rediscover the lost sources of Arian power. He even travels to Iceland in search of Thule.
Hermann Goering wanted to kill everybody in Poland so that the ancient forests sacred to the Teutonic race could be replanted.
- In the 19'th century apologists of imperialism argued that each race has a different Nature. They had many primitive pseudo-scientific rationales for this. The British argued that African races by Nature were "incapable of Civilization" on their own but that they could be "raised up" by the benign intervention of the British race - as they called themselves - to the high plane of civilized men. Africans were considered to be a middle race - by Nature not animals but by Nature not truly human either. For them the only moral outcome was to be colonized so that they could experience civilized life and be at their best. Slavery was better for them than living in Africa because as slaves they could - admittedly only in an inferior and simplistic form - partake in civilization.(BTW: the Island of Dr. Moreau is really talking about this view point and I think argues rather cynically that it is immoral to raise up inferior races to a higher plane). I will always remember in a documentary about Rhodesia when the reporter asked a Rhodesian - white woman - of British descent - whether she "really thought that Blacks are inferior." Her answer was "Oh no. Oh no. They are perfectly capable of service."
During the 1850's when the debate over slavery in the United States was raging, the British pleaded with The United States not to free the slaves as they,the British, had mistakenly done in the 1830's. They said that the freed slaves ,rather than cultivating the plantations on their own and participating in agriculture and commerce and other civilized persuits, returned to their natural state of uncivilized life. They left the plantations untended allowing the jungle to return to overgrow the once cultivated fields and roads and instead, lived idly in shacks on primitive subsistence. By allowing them freedom they had been cruelly allowed to pursue their lower Nature and inevitably returned to uncivilized life. Some Americans countered this by saying that this view of African human Nature was wrong and that the American slaves proved this by their ability to run plantations completely on their own.
I think that these racist ideas persist and in the end, boil down to a view of human Nature.
- To me the different views of Human Nature have been the foundation of moral systems whether they are justified theologically, biologically,philosophically, or mystically. A question for me in this era of terrorism is question of how far a state can go to "protect its people." For instance, is it OK for President Bush and President Obama to use the state of national emergency to override Congress through the use of signing statements? Are we not depriving Americans of their Natural rights? Was it OK for the KBG to install a police state to "protect the state from enemies." ? Is it OK to put entire populations behind barbed wire to protect the people of another state? Is it OK to blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust in order to protect the people? Or how about just blow up everyone in a terrorist state? At what point do we deprive other people and ourselves of our Human Nature?
