Moral Accountability

In today's Western society, there are few philosophies as aggressive to those who adhere to the Christian faith as what many philosophers and theologians have named "The New Atheism." This New Atheism owes much of it's increase in popularity to those intellectuals in the upper echelons of many academic institutions. People like Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss, Bill Maher, and the late Christopher Hitchens have done more to further the new atheism and have aided in promoting it's more aggressive nature. It is this aggressive side of the new atheism that I want to address in this post.

There are several issues with many of the attacks on religion from the new atheistic point of view because they tend to make assumptions and claims that just are not true. Here are a few examples, along with counter arguments.

• Religion does not promote and even harms scientific progress.
• This claim is just down right not true. Historically speaking many of the greatest early scientists and mathematicians were religious. Isaac Newton was a Christian, René DesCartes was a Christian, and many of the earliest advancements in Astronomy were made by Islamic astronomers.
• Religion is responsible for much of the death and war in the world.
• This claim is an over-generalization and is an attempt to reach into the past and assign the blame of the horrors of the Crusades on Christianity, when in all actuality the crusades spawned from the greed and human depravity that wormed its way into the early Catholic Church. The Crusades had nothing to do with the actual teachings of Christ and true Christianity. Perhaps a better argument against this claim is the fact that most wars and conflicts are due to resources, or in the case of Hitler and WWII the annihilation of a religious group among many other things.
• Religion no longer benefits society.
• My argument for this would simply be to point at just about any hospital and the fact that they all either have Saint, Methodist, or Baptist somewhere in the name.
• Religion (particularly Christianity) is an opiate to the masses used for control.
• Anyone who knows anything of Christianity knows that at its heart, it strips all control of the believer from any worldly person and hands it over to God. Standing up to the rulers of the world is a common theme from the Old Testament to the New. This is one of the many reasons that fueled the American Revolution. Christianity teaches that a man's life is not governed by other men, nor is it governed by themselves rather submitted to God alone.

Perhaps what is more frustrating than these claims is what I have found to be an underlying reason why the new atheism seeks to remove Christianity from the forefront of western culture and it is because Christianity offers a form of moral accountability. This is one of the main reasons that you see Christianity attacked over other religions such as Buddhism. Buddhism, at its core, is atheistic. The source of moral accountability comes from within. Therefore Buddhism is not a threat to the humanistic "do what thou wilt" mentality. The same can be true for the current "spiritualism" movement that teaches that the source of truth comes from within, taking God from transcendence and applying the divine to oneself. This is the tragedy of new atheism; to make man his own God, removing any form of moral accountability, therefore making all things permissible.

Many Atheists will disagree with me, and that is fine but it is the truth. As I stated in my last post, if all that we are as humans is the result of time, matter, and chance, just another link in the food chain, then morality is arbitrary. Survival of the fittest, if we are not in some way part of a bigger story, completely justifies, murder, thievery, lust, etc.

The world needs moral accountability that is transcendent from humanity. If man can create his own morality, then it would be ever changing, constantly molded and shaped in order to fit the mindset of any particular culture. The issue with this is just that. Without any transcendent moral accountability we become lost in the unnavigable waters of relativism without any point of reference. We become sailors without the north star to guide us home in the night.

I leave you today with the first portion of a hymn by Edward Mote:
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus Christ, my righteousness
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
But wholly trust in Jesus' name
On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand