Doing Good for Goodness Sake? An Atheist's Game of Scrabble Comments
In the order of being, there can be no natural moral law without the existence of God. In the order of being, implicit in the belief of a natural moral law is the existence of God. A moral law makes no sense without a Divine Legislator. Continue Reading
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Spe Salvi isnt too bad at an explaination either.
chrisdbarry presented many of the problems I also found with this article (thank you).
But, I would like to say--as the muse, evidently, for this piece-- I happen to like scrabble very much; it's really the only board game I'll actually play from time to time. Nevertheless, as excited as I was to read the article about atheism, seeing the words "murder" (9pts.) and "lust" (4pts.) soured my enthusiasm. "Wrath" (11pts.) and "gluttony" (12pts.) would have been more erudite choices for a sophisticated theology lesson.
Joking aside, I was in actual fact soured by the end of the very first paragraph. With "as if Christians don't," the author does what he does best: leaps to conclusions without evidence. What an unfortunate interpretation of an economic use of five words: do good for goodness sake. Economic yes, as this article is over 1500 words long. Twisting five words into fifteen hundred words is what theology excels at, it would seem. In actual fact the author could have responded with two words: faith (11pts.) and evidence (14pts.). Evidence wins over faith. Every.Single.Time. Cheers! -Mike
I am just glad we have atheists reading Catholic.org. I don't actually believe they are atheists. I believe they are desperately searching for the one argument that will convince them that God truly does exists and loves them in their arrogance. Unfortunately for the writers of this article and others like it, only God can give them that argument. Fortunately for the rest of us, God listens to prayers.
Vance, do you know any atheists??? Diane, a lot of atheists I know are atheists because they see (and experience) all the pain in the world, they see some people claiming to be followers of God executing that pain, and they lose hope. There's nothing selfish about that.
They can and will be more arrogant, Kira, just you wait and see. And thanks, chrisdbarry, for that spot-on analysis.
When I was an atheist, I took the basic Judeo-Christian morality I absorbed as a child and, using that at a base, developed my own moral system, freely abandoning key aspects of the former in order to make morality my own enterprise. However, I eventually realized that doing this is like trying to fly up to the sun on waxen wings -- that man, in his wounded nature, does not have the grace and wisdom to manage his own destiny without the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit of God. It was my arrogance in assuming I could do a better job of living a moral life than the God who created me that led me into much moral depravity during my years as an atheist. Only returning to the Source of all Truth brought peace and hope back into my life. Let me conclude by saying that a flower, once separated from its root, retains its beauty for a time, but eventually decay sets in, and the inevitable result of this separation becomes painfully evident...
Athiests seem to me to be people who reject grace from God to know God. I think they make that choice out of fear and their unwillingness to accept that even in the knowledge, love and worship of God is still the Mystery of so much of God. They are more like petulant and irritable children who say "Well, if God won't reveal Himself entirely to me and others then I'll just say He doesn't exist!" It's this terrible inability to bear the mystery of God. Many will bear the Mystery of Science( the unknown things of science) yet never say that science doesn't exist or isn't needed. Yet they can't take that attitude towards God. Strange and unreasonable and sometimes I think, just plain childish.
Good is done for the sake of goodness is well said & done, but the problem arises when good is termed evil or when right is turned wrong as the present US administration makes it out to be. That's confusion, because there is absent a firm base, which base is to the spiritual in the truth of it, on the contrary making this confusion based on a floater which is to Atheism or Paganism its other head, where as the firm base, not to confusion is to God, for God is not an author of confusion but that which floats is caught in the Adversary, the author of confusion.
Great article. An atheist never does good for goodness sake. He does good for his own sake. That is to say he does good for himself. He may do good for his friends or immediate family but that's where it ends.
Many logical fallacies and assumptions... You move from "do good for goodness' sake" to "therefore there is a god" only by making leaps of logic, assumptions of intention on behalf of the writer and you beg many a question.
I will state my assumptions in asking you a question: Assuming the atheist ascribes to a humanist philosophy (and there is no reason to assume this, he could ascribe to another philosophy), instead of trotting out arguments from Thomas Aquinas that have been debunked already, why don't you actually discuss a real philosophical alternative? Atheism is simple the statement that there is no god. It makes no positive philosophical statement of belief. This reader made a single statement to which you ascribed numerous underpinning beliefs, which simply cannot be safely assumed. Theism, in the form of Catholicism, makes many claims to explain the world (and now that it knows about it, the universe). Your best option is not to argue against an atheist position (which is essentially a null hypothesis), but to argue against another philosophical position that makes positive claims (such as humanism).
Also, it seems as if you are writing from the position of someone who has never actually read alternative philosophical positions, otherwise you wouldn't make the simple and naive statements that you make.