h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

you are indulging in stereotypes instead of basing it on facts. Who are the atheists you talk to? My friends and I are all atheists (with a few exceptions) and none of us discriminate against the church. We all endorse it and agree that it is good for values and helps raise good people. AND I'M TIRED OF EVERY ARTICLE ABOUT ATHEISTS TALKING ABOUT OXYMORONS!

and I don't really think that atheists choose to do something as a whole, since they are by nature a seperated lobby, they each have their own outlook and interpretation.

Surely the whole point of atheism is that it is based on rationalism. (At least that is the definition offered by the National Secular Society). Which means that:

* Atheism should be based on science, not conjecture
* Darwinism is the predominant biological model
* Anything we posit about human beings should hold true to it

Being an atheist does not entitle you to believe whatever you want to. Rather it releases you to hold to the facts, not to fairy tales. Surely this is the whole point. What the article did as I understand it was to point to the logical conclusions of atheism. And if one cannot deal with those, then don't be an atheist. You can't have your cake and eat it.

This article is more than a little off. It's missed the point entirely.

Atheism is the *absence* of religious belief. This leaves a person free to construct a moral center without concern for eternal rewards or punishments. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," for example, is very humanistic, and, despite the fact that it is often misrepresented as a "Judeo-Christian ethic," it is actually as old as civilization, and each civilization had its own variation on it, dating back to Sumer. It's the very glue that keeps civilization together.

This article only seeks to create a new religion based on Darwin's theory of evolution. But we're finding out that Darwin was wrong in some ways, so using his theory as a moral basis is pretty foolish.

Besides, you've got a serious contradiction here. How is the human species "advanced" if we hurt, neglect, or abuse people? Don't people who are hurt, neglected, or abused die early, and inflict casualties on others? And isn't it a part of the Darwinian theory that the need to procreate and increase the number of your species is a natural evolutionary force? The two do not equate.

This article could stand, with some serious modification, as "Darwinism, morals, and ethics," but it does not in any lucid way discuss atheism. It is a dogmatic attempt to discredit atheism by first attempting to turn it into a religion of disrepute.

Richard Dawkins and those fuzzy atheists are practicing woolly thinking known as "philosophy." Unlike theists, atheists can seperate their religion from their philosophy, since they have no religion at all. Humanism is a philosophy that many, but not necessarily all, atheists can identify with. And humanism easily relates to evolutionary theory. It's an attempt to evolve mankind culturally/societally, rather than genetically.

Genetics, under the Darwinian model, are supposed to take care of themselves. But as we've seen, Darwin didn't have it quite right.

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that here someone has defined atheism for their own purposes. Atheism is just a statement of what is NOT believed, leaving open what - if anything - IS believed. There is no necessity for atheistic beliefs to be "based on science, not conjecture", although such beliefs are not obviously incompatible with atheism.

The entry is full of contradictions, and seems to me to be merely a vehicle for the author's own brand of atheism.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

There's no point in saying that atheism is based on rationalism unless you're prepared to say what you mean by rationalism.
And in the case of ethics to say what you mean by a rational ethics.
To decide that pursuing a policy of "the devil take the hindmost" is the 'right' thing to do because it is the way nature works (debatable in any case in the human context) you are making a value judgement that we should behave in a certain way on that account, but other judgements are equally possible. Although science can inform ethical debate in various ways it is never the final arbiter of good and bad. Human motivational systems are, quite simply, MUCH more complex than the author seems to appreciate, and much more grounded in social goals and agreements.

Besides, I LIKE to be nice to people.

Noggin

' ... we're finding out that Darwin was wrong in some ways, so using his theory as a moral basis is pretty foolish.'

Good point. As a slight aside - though still related, I feel sure - an attempt at counterbalance from CS Lewis [square brackets are me paraphrasing for brevity and/or clarity]:

'If things can improve [by means of emergent evolution], this means there must be some absolute standard of 'good' above and outside the cosmic process to which [evolution belongs]. There is no sense in talking of 'becoming better', if better means simply, 'what we are becoming'. It's like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination, then defining your destination as, 'the place you've reached'.