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richardhutnik on 03 May 2013
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kanageddaamen said:

So your argument is that slavery is morally ambiguous?  That it is sometimes okay to keep another person against their will and force them to perform labor for you?  This illustrates Hitchen's point precisely.  The only way to reach a conclusion of moral acceptability of slavery is to either a.) be told it is okay by religion or b.) hold a view that a separate group of people (the slaves) are innately inferior to another (the slavers) and hence its okay to treat them as animals.

My assertion that slavery is immoral is not based on my "modern view" but on logical analysis and a lack of a superiority view of myself over others.  You argue that slavery is conditionally moral based how society feels about it, I argue that slavery is unconditionally immoral and society allowed it and judged it okay due to selfishness, greed, and racial or religious bias (among other things)

I notice you make the mistake a lot of religious people make and treat atheism as a religion.  It isn't.  Atheists are all individual people with a variety of motivations and personalities sharing no common group of beliefs or doctrines.  They just believe in one less god than you do.  That is all that connects these people into a "group"

A religion on the other hand, has a set of history, beliefs and tenants that are agreed upon by all participants and can be pointed to as motivators for that group.  This is the crux of Hitchen's argument.  There is no moral thing that religion allows someone to do that an atheist cannot.  Religion does however justify immoral things which there is no basis for justification for an atheist.

 

Societies have slavery historically, whether religious or not.  Atheism doesn't produce any moral change in society at all, because it is a negation of a belief, and negations are nothing, thus they don't provide any change.  Slavery even still exists in various forms, even right down to working for corporations where you have no right to intellectual property you create.  You get a wage and turn over property, and make a corporation rich.  There is also the reality of student loans where students can't declare bankruptcy.  There is also human trafficing that still goes on today.  In this, there is a VERY poor showing of examples of people who become atheistic being anyone different than they were before they were religious.  They are the same person.  They do what they do now, rationalized even stronger.  They remain who they are.   You even have the likes of Stalin, who fell out of the Christian religion and became a monster.   He no longer even had the commands of Jesus.

And that is a point here.  In DOING that which is moral and so on, exactly what leads to a genuine repentant experience to a position that is moral where someone does anything different?  The drive to convert to atheism is done on a personal level, so no outside anything makes a person do such.  In Hitchens, you end you seeing one person who did become a Socialist in his early years and then decided it was better to be a neocon and supported war.  You see little evidence of the poor.  Any semblance of a conversion experience isn't really notable.  AT MOST, you see the change being the person alone who shows some sign.  Their change really doesn't do much for others aroiund them.