Amis on Morality

Secularism contains no warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the head of hostages, they shout, "God is great!" When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?

[Martin Amis, from The Second Plane; quoted by Richard Dawkins, "I Am Offended", YouTube.com, 8 October 2008; via Mike Tidmus.]

Dawkins' point was this: when followers of a religion–any religion–commit atrocities in the name of their god, they and their supporters feel righteous and good, and that is morally wrong. The chain of implications that refute, say, the frequently touted claim (touted by the aforementioned self-righteous fundamentalist religious) that religion is the primary source of human morality is obvious.

Dawkins, in his presentation, added that one reviewer of Amis' book had answered this rhetorical question this way: "They shout 'Heil Hitler!' ", which is quite laughable for at least two reasons. First, of course, is that Hitler described himself as a christian doing his god's work, and most of his followers would have said the same. Second, it doesn't reflect well on the reviewer that he seems to have confused Nazi Germany with the officially atheist Socialist Soviet Union.

Ah well, the self-righteous have more important things to get correct, apparently, than historical facts.

Posted on May 18, 2010 at 12.28 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, Personal Notebook

One Response

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  1. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Monday, 24 May 2010 at 01.50
    Permalink

    Good points, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment. I think the reviewer who said "Heil Hitler" invoked that because, no matter what he called himself, Hitler was the embodiment of evil. BTW, the situation of German churches in the Third Reich should be required reading for fundamentalist Christians who insist there should be no separation of church and state.

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