The result is Richard Carrier, “ On the Facts as We Know Them, Ethical Naturalism Is All There Is: A Reply to Matthew Flannagan,” Philo 15.2 (Fall-Winter 2012), pp.
Sinnott-Armstrong was probably bored at this point. Several years ago (though it entered print only a couple years ago) I published a paper in the philosophy journal Philo, responding to Christian fundamentalist Matthew Flannagan on behalf of noted atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, whom Flannagan had written an article against, defending William Lane Craig’s Divine Command Theory against Sinnott-Armstrong’s rather scathing destruction of it. Except… That you have to invent a better Jesus than the one that’s in the Book, really says all that needs saying here. But that’s just a guy you are making up in your head. A Jesus who fought for abolition and women’s suffrage and the decriminalization of homosexuality-and, oh, let’s say, promoted democracy and human rights and universal education ( also not things Jesus ever says one word for in the Bible). You can always invent any Jesus you want, of course. This Jesus is actually a morally dubious person. Oh no, you are supposed to wait for Jesus to murder them (Matthew 3:12). So you better do what he says.Īnd lest we forget, that’s the Jesus who has nothing to say against slavery or the subjugation and disenfranchisement of women or the execution of homosexuals, other than, at best, that you shouldn’t invite sluts and homos to legally murder the sluts and homos because that would be hypocritical (John 7:52-8:11, a forgery). This all totally makes sense.Ī cosmic Jewish zombie named Jesus who telekinetically fathered himself by a virgin and now resides in outer space, is possessed by the spirit of a supernal ghost that is in some sort of parallel-dimensioning identical with but distinct from himself and an ancient Canaanite storm god, and promises to make you live forever in an alternate dimension if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that has eternally tainted our mammalian flesh ever since a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. So we can’t deny, his will and character is now the ground of all morality. Because he is now eternal and the supreme being and made the universe. Well, I guess we better get down with murder and elegant cannibalism or else he’ll be angry with us and send us to hell. Hannibal Lecter created the universe? He escaped from a future holodeck simulation and then used a stolen TARDIS to Make the Universe after evaporating God by discovering the Babel Fish? Oh crap. Which means, they are essentially the gestapo of whatever random ignorant madmen wrote their scriptures and now thumps their pulpits with sufficiently fiery claims of special divine communications at bedtime. Or rather, whatever monster some men made up and duped them into thinking it made the universe. Theists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of whatever monster manufactured the universe. Unless they covertly adopt a naturalistic moral theory (and most do), they are not actually moral people. But in fact theists have no reason to actually be moral, as in: to elevate compassion, honesty, and reasonableness above all authority, even the authority of their own gods. Theists complain atheists have no reason to be moral. Theology has no salvageable theory of morality.
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