1. False sensationalism? Were you not referencing Social Darwinism in the previous passage that I quoted? If you were referencing something else, then I apologize, though you may want to be more clear in your expositions about why laws based on an evolutionary premise only lead to things like Nazi death camps... The heading of this thread asks the question of whether or not Atheists have morals.. There are then 50 some odd pages of theists making arguments for how/why Atheists are amoral douchebags and that the only way that something can objectively be wrong is if God exists. The very premise of that idea is that a society completely devoid of a deity would not be able to come up with the same laws and regulations as we have today. Frankly, that's a sensationalist claim, not to mention quite insulting.
Yes, but that is not what I was referring to as sensationalism. It was the claim you made that insinuated I or any Christian thinks atheists lack morals.
2. I'm not sure I follow. Social Darwinism, as we know it, could not have existed prior to the popular understanding of Darwinian thought, right? Has the concept, independent of the title, existed before - almost certainly. It's what the Spartans are known for - selective breeding and intervening in the process of natural selection, much like we do with dogs.
This would come down to subjective popularity. The idea that things evolve is very old but it was not always popular. I don't know where the line between popularity% and the requirement to develop social ethics based on it is. BTW I don't really call what Hitler did social Darwinism. He more or less took the idea of survival of the strong at the expense of the weak that any observation of nature can justify and extrapolated. That has been called social Darwinism in our time but the exact same idea could have existed without the label 4000 years ago.
3.I'd like to see a reference of what you're talking about.
Sure:
The Sixth Day: Creatures on Land
24Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so.
25God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
26Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."…
If you look at the big time Cabalists like Maimonides they without any of modern sciences discoveries thought that Genesis concerned long ages of time, and no Hebrew calendar starts until Adam was made because they don't consider the days before Adam to be earth centric 24 hour days.
4.There's a lot of nationalism in this response and that's not something I care to get involved in. I will posit, however, that there are also incredibly prosperous nations with much lower crime rates, a much more level economic playing field, better equipped to promote healthier family units, full of much more egalitarian people and they are admittedly without a predominate religion. Wouldn't their existence kind of blow a whole in this entire argument? I mean, if even one atheistic nation is able to produce, for all intents and purposes, a more equal, just, and prosperous populace without the use of God, then doesn't that render the argument that God is necessary for the creation of morals to be moot?
Yes and no. I do not like the country so much that I grew up in. It is still far better than most others but it was the nation as it pre-existed me that was so extraordinary. You can even see our entire cycle predicted in Taylor's history of Governments. This can get very complex. We have a crime rate, but can easily be seen as a function of greater personal liberty and the legal context that all men are presumed innocent, or Sweden's prosperity as mainly because they are sitting on huge untapped natural resources. The things you can say is the west has generally be founded on two primary things. Jerusalem, and Athens. I usually tack on Rome to those two but you get the drift. Good or bad Christianity has been at the heart of the western world.
Also, you can't blame the poor state affairs stateside on immigrants and the secular revolution. If you want to credit the prosperity of the United States to the Christian populace and Christian fundamentals, then you cannot deny the ills of the United States as being their responsibility as well just because it's inconvenient. You mentioned the 50s as being the turning point, right? Wasn't there some sort of great social and cultural disparity that had been going on in this country for, like, 200 years prior to that secular revolution which finally allowed a certain branch of our society equal social freedoms? Wasn't the stagnation of those freedoms fueled by those same Christian principles?... See what I mean? You can't cherry pick.
I did not blame the immigrants though they are getting to be a burden. Secularism arose in the late 50's and you can track the downfall of just about every moral statistic from that time. Some are many times over worse. I have given hundreds and links to thousands of them but if you want to see the difference pick any weeks TV programming from 1950 and compare it to 2010. Short of porn and live dissections I don' think we can go any lower on broadcast programming. If anything is a moral barometer television is among the best.
No the hippy revolution was not really about anything. It was more about whatever is, is wrong. If your referring to slavery that was another movement that occurred a little earlier. While there is no argument against a hippy because his position is not based on reason the civil rights issues does point out something interesting. When Martin Luther King laid down his promissory note (IOW his guarantee of equality) it was not founded in any eastern philosophy, no atheistic utopia, no secular philosopher, etc....... it was founded squarely on Christianity and the rights that only God can bestow. Equality can't grant value or equality to anything. It has never made any tow things equal. MLK knew he had to transcend man to find his grounds for equality and he did so with eloquence and verve, same with Gandhi, and Jesus.