The inquiring mind of an agnostic atheist wanted to know:

So I know most Christians don’t believe this, but… why is it some Christians believe that in order to be an atheist you must hate god?

If you ask an atheist if he hates God, he is likely to laugh at the idea—because to his mind, uncritically conditioned by secular dogma, "God" is an empty abstraction that has no qualitative features about which to feel anything. That is, it’s somewhat difficult to feel anything about an abstract concept. But when you take that empty abstraction and fill it with everything that distinguishes who the living God of Scriptures is, you will then encounter their pronounced hatred for him.

Atheists don’t feel anything about "God," but they do hate God.

Update 10 July 2009: Here is an appropriate and relevant quote I enjoyed from Horatius Bonar in his essay "God’s Will and Man’s Will" (c. 1851) [PDF]: "It is the Gospel that he hates; and the more clearly it is set before him, he hates it the more. It is God that he hates; and the more vividly God is set before him, the more does his enmity awaken and augment. Surely, then, that which stirs up enmity cannot of itself remove it."

(This post may be subject to updates.)

I had a brief discussion with an atheist on the question of morality (which began with him trying to understand when, according to the Bible, killing is immoral and when it isn’t, for he thought it was a very gray issue). If anyone wants to know how I answered the "killing" question, let me know and I shall post it. Otherwise, I want to share my response to him on the morality question itself.

I do not understand how someone can say, "You cannot have morals without religion." Don’t we have a conventional morality apart from God that adequately guides our moral choices?

Conventional morality is unreliable because it is man trying to interpret and understand his moral compass without acknowledging the source thereof. We have an innate sense of right and wrong because all mankind is created in the image of God, the ground of moral order. But if we ignore his Word and try to understand morality by our own sin-laden wisdom, we wander across very shaky terrain with inherently unreliable results.

But the situation is actually more desperate, for by dismissing God from the equation we actually end up with no intelligible morality at all. In a godless framework, man is just a biochemical collection of molecules and atoms operating according to the physical laws of the universe; things like morality, consciousness, knowledge, etc., are accidental illusions, i.e., not real. The logical conclusion of a godless framework is Nihilism.

You’re staking quite a large claim, that morality outside of Christianity cannot exist.

It seems you misunderstood my position. I certainly think morality can, and does, exist outside Christian theism. Remember, I said we all have "an innate sense of right and wrong because all mankind is created in the image of God, the ground of moral order." Christians are not by any means the only people who recognize right and wrong. Non-believers do too, quite obviously.

Christians are, however, the only ones who can account for morality qua morality. Non-believers are not able to do this, because "by dismissing God from the equation [they] actually end up with no intelligible morality at all." Non-believers have the capacity to recognize right and wrong (ethics), but they are incapable of accounting for this feature (meta-ethics) because the assumptions they bring to the task prevent them from transcending the descriptive to the prescriptive. In other words, at best they can achieve only biographical or sociological ‘is’ statements (descriptive); they cannot achieve moral ‘should’ statements (prescriptive).

Therein lies the rub. Most non-believers innately believe that certain things are properly immoral and objectively so, such as murdering children. But at the same time they seem unaware that such beliefs are not produced by their worldview, a cognitive deficit brought into sharp focus when they attempt to defend their moral stance by reaching into their worldview for the necessary currency and finding none. This is why I characterized it as "no intelligible morality." The view they express on a specific immoral act (such as murdering children) is often wildly inconsistent with the moral theory described by their worldview.

Incidentally, this is one reason why every Problem of Evil argument inescapably fails.

Despite the feelings that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expresses about the United States, it seems that his recent presidential campaign in Iran took careful notes from the Bush campaign of 2004 [1]. For better or worse (and history will decide), official reports are that Ahmadinejad has won the Iranian elections [2].

My feelings about this are very mixed at the moment.

The reason it has taken me nearly four months to write about this story is because I hadn’t heard anything about it until yesterday afternoon (4 June 2009) while listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR. I blame the media for failing to report on this because I listen to hours of news coverage every day, so it’s not any failing on my part. In particular, I listen to the P.O.T.U.S. channel on Sirius XM Radio for six to eight hours every day, which provides me breaking news at the top of each hour from AP Radio News and quite a number of select blogcasts. Not once in four months had I heard anything about this story.

Anyway, during a news break yesterday on NPR, I heard the announcer state:

A trial date has been set for a Muslim American businessman in New York. He’s charged with beheading his estranged wife at a TV station the couple created to counter Muslim stereotypes. He has pleaded "not guilty" to second degree murder.

Did you catch that? Go ahead, take a moment to finish laughing.

A television station created to counter negative Muslim stereotypes is where this notable businessman in the Muslim community of New York, Muzzammil Syed Hassan, chose to stab and behead his wife of eight years, Aasiya Zubair (allegedly, of course, as he is charged and formally indicted, but not convicted.) Yes, a tragic event like that could definitely go a long way toward dispelling negative Muslim stereotypes, especially when one factors in his eight-year long history of domestic abuses against her, and the fact that his two former wives had likewise filed for divorce on grounds of severe domestic violence and abuses.

Perhaps he wasn’t the best candidate for dispelling Muslim stereotypes?

Adding another level of irony to this story is the fact that President Barack Obama’s recent speech in Cairo, Egypt, despite being well-received and enjoying high praise, is on one level being criticized for failing to adequately address the state of women’s rights and related issues in the Muslim world. It is incidents such as this, particularly that it was a Muslim American family in New York, that underscores the need for these issues to be confronted in a substantive way (cf. Chesler, Phyllis. "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?" Middle East Quarterly 16 [2009]: 61-69. Print.). And it should begin with leaders of Islamic communities in the United States.

My collection of notes on this story can be found here [PDF].