In public perception. A common misconception links secular individuals to immorality due to the
assumption that with what out belief in a deity, morals are not possible.
Recent research by Professor Will serve As reveals this bias impacting political and social interactions.
Historical influence of religious authorities, complexity of morality, and projection contribute to
this stereotype. Projection is that when the negative qualities are projected onto others.
When one's own or one's own groups, negative qualities are projected onto others,
seen in stereotypes of Native Americans as savages or Black men as predators. Interestingly,
projection might explain why the stereotype of atheists as a moral persists. Theists
may project their own moral shortcomings onto atheists to avoid self examination. Ironically,
nonreligious people often hold the more compassionate just stances on issues like gun control,
climate change, immigration, and healthcare. The stereotype is flawed. Empirical data
indicates nonbelievers often advocate for empathy and justice. This raises questions about the true
sources of morality and who truly demonstrates it. This comes from the center in
the mirror. Why atheists are stereotyped as in World Moral on Secular Humanism dot
org by Professor Phil Zuckerman in February March twenty twenty three issue and Cynthia,
would you like to take this? Sure, I'll take it. It's so
weird to be told that you are not moral because you don't believe in a
God. And it's interesting that we have reports from multiple religious sources and organizations
about sexual assaults, about grooming, about financial impropriety and downright theft, that
we are still saying them atheists don't believe in God and they ain't shit,
you know, So I find it very interesting about that, But I know
that I have panelists and hostess that have more interesting SISIs things to say about
this infidel. Please tell me your sisters is about morality and atheistsiss. Well,
you know, I read the article and it mentioned free will and different
arguments regarding morality. But truthfully, I think that missus point Christians aren't going
to church over a serious philosophical position. They're just regurgitating what they're told on
Sunday. They say their morals come from the Bible, but they really have
no idea what the Bible says. On traditional marriage. The Bible sets a
price for a rape victim to forcibly marry her rape abortion. The Bible has
a recipe for the priest to cause an abortion, but only to protect a
man's right. Christ is deeply misunderstand what it actually means to be an ace.
They've been told so many lies about But for many of us, you
know, it wasn't a thing like change churches like they would think. It's
a deconstruction process, removing those bad ideas that come from the same place.
Oftentimes that they're getting what they think are good idea. I know that,
speaking personally, I'm a far more moral and balanced person than I ever could
have been. I'm not defined by a lack of belief. I'm a father,
a husband, a friend, and I hope sometimes a positive influence.
You know, they look at their morality, but they have a guide to
get out of jail free car. I don't have that. I don't have
a guy to forgive me when I do wrong. I live with it those
kinds. If you're good because of God, then you're just not good,
you know. As I said, it's my job to be a better job,
better person. It's not It's not some God that's gonna dictate that,
and it's not a God dictating dictating it to them. Now, Phil,
what were your thoughts? Well, yeah, we usually heard from the oh,
my morality is objective. Your is a subjective because I have an objective.
But then you ought secress. Okay, what do we mean by moral?
What is more? Really, let me use the word moral. What
do we really mean in my case? And I guess in the case of
the others here and they think they will agree, is that let me talk
about being moral? We're talking about anything that is related to kindness towards others,
where we also minimize harm to others, fairness, justice, I don't.
I am still a bit puzzled as to what the theist means by moral
because I was saying some cases, some of them will say about Okay,
yes that is so, but usually in multiple cases is whatever God says,
whyever? God says, whyever? God says that's moral? No? How
do we just that morality? Right? And we so Usually then you get
these uh then persons saying, oh, but look look at him, some
of those if his countries where it is suppressed and do terrible things to people
like North Korea. But I usually point out to them, Yeah, they
might not hold a belief in the God. But the thing is is that
it is not necessary there if he isn't that is it is that is causing
them to do that. A lot of them set up themselves as a quote
unquote idol, like inself in North Korea. Right, So it's not really
that. But when we look at the morality of the church, morality of
church, and you look in history, you realize the church is not these
some moral and then they got into power, different denominations got into power.
They everybody else suffered, right, And as someone correctly said, it raises
the question when we look at the Bible, it talks about the morality.
Okay, you want to say God is moral? What about the genocide?
What about these slavery? What about they taking young women and for your from
spells of war and marrying them without their consent? Look at the misogyny.
So on the other hand, usually, especially when we have humanism, humanists,
we care these are this is what we call moral we call moral justice,
kindness, all of those things we we we we we relate to and
that is then using that we can judge whether or not your God is moral
because that is it? Not because of God says so right, and and
again it is I think yes, it's projection because a lot of them are
projecting. And as we've seen earlier, you know, sometimes people do they're
they're they're persons within the church that do some very despicable stuff like like abusing
children, practicing pedeophilic behavior, pediophiles. So are they really any more moral
than us? That's good what you said, John. I don't think there
are any more moral than we are. When I was reading this article,
I found a lot of things that I was curious about. One of them
is some of the historical references he made, like John Locke. I've read
Locke mandatory reading for political science majors, but I never came across this that
he atheists shouldn't. This is a sixteen eighty five that atheists should not be
granted any legal or civil rights because promises, covenants, and oaths are obviously
meaningless to them. And that's just an idea. How long this is a
cultural and societal can documentation? Can I just say, Jonathan and Panel,
what if that were today? Like can you actually imagine like if they took
that particular sensibility from the sixteen hundreds to say that any person that does not
believe in God has no civil rights, has no same society. You know,
don't vote, can't talk against your leaders, et cetera, et cetera.
I almost feel like they were here today. I'm not sure. I
just had to just put that in because I found that also very very interesting,
that this is an old sensibility that seems like it's actually coming back up
again in some cases a way of forms. But I digress, and the
please continue. Yeah, Well, the culture and societal views and indoctrination are
what caused a lot of the tropes. And I think it's at least fifteen
hundred years that we've had Christian thought that had taken over. By fifteen hundred
years ago, they taken over most of Europe, and they this was a
common thought at that point, and they were considered like heretics. There were
some godless people back there, especially I know of one in Romania, but
I'm not going to get into that. Clarence Thomas, thinking about today's problems
we have with us, has suggested that taking an oath is clearly pointless for
atheists because we have no supernatural power to swear to it or buy. So
you know, these beliefs still persist. And this guy's a Supreme Court judge.
Well he's not a very good one, and he's also not a very
law abiding one, but he's there. Yeah, we want to go there.
Yeah, we'll do a story on that some other time. We probably
will. But you know, two thousand years of social indoctrination and bad branding
and most people intuitively and automatically see atheists and moral and the article he really
tried to dig into a little bit of why that is. The one point
I liked was because morality is a philosophical, cultural, historical, neurological,
and bio evolutionary components to it. It is one of the most difficult areas
of human activity to understand or explain. And then he says, it knows,
just take an ethics class, you know, And what do we do
with the trolley? He was referring to the trolley problem. So it is,
and anybody who's studied any kind of philosophy will tell you that it's not
easy to get so, says John is trying to nuke his way through Nietzsche
again. Anyway, Dictators the dictator's problem. Well, we don't know for
sure. The only people I'm sure didn't have religious views are Marx and Lenin.
If you think about the others, Mao, Kim Jong un, they
have different forms of religion in the Far East that don't necessarily are not necessarily
antithetical to communist philosophy. So we don't really know one way or the other
if all of the hated members of the dictatorships of the early to mid nineteen
hundreds, some periods of which I lived through, you know, if they
were truly anti religion or not. I don't remember hearing that Mao destroyed any
of the temples in China. He may have, but I never heard of
it. So that's another point that I wanted to make. But it doesn't
matter, because it was the propaganda involved in that that the anti communism was
also projected onto atheists. These guys are atheists, Marks, Lenin, Trotsky.
You know, there's a whole pile you could list, Yeah, right,
and so those can that that follows that you can project that same problem
with atheism, whereas once again, this is a projection because they're the ones
who want to basically ethnically cleanse and do all the things that they are accusing
these dictators of doing. So it's but that's because they cannot internalize that they
are that evil, even though they may be. So it's that unconscious thought
has to go somewhere, so they put it onto other people. And this
is show soal psychological projection is a thing, particularly an identity group or at
a group think kind of level, like people identify with a group. We
talked about earlier about how with that kind of emotional coming from an isolation into
a group, that group can do no wrong because you want to belong to
that group. So that then when that group is projecting their distastes and dislikes
onto atheists or other group groups that are marginalized and basically powerless in comparison,
that's what's happening. And he talks a lot about a social psychological projection in
this and it's a thing, and we can see it in everything. In
the introduction, I mentioned American Indians for two hundred years, we were saying
how brutal and brutish and savage they were. That was our own projection of
our move west. We burned villages, women, children, We did a
lot of that, and then they claimed that the Indians were doing it even
in Prince Phillip's King Phillip's Rebellion in New England. They didn't necessarily do that.
So it's like, I get that really really kind of irks me a
little. Phil Zuckerman is actually a professor and he's, you know, like
I said, at the he's at the a university in uh he's at the
university blah blah blah, Sorry my mouth isn't working, and in California as
a professor of sociology and secular secular thought, secular or something like that.
And so this is coming from a guy who has spent his academic career studying
this kind of stuff, so he really got into the psychological, social,
psychological aspect of it. And my opinion on the whole thing is that basically
old tropes die heart because they have been indoctrinated, but not just indoctrinated,
inculcated. They're part of our culture and rewriting that script out of our culture
is incredibly difficult, and we need some better marketing and better branding, and
we have to be actively debunking this in the public sphere, in the public
state, if we want to start to make these people realize that you don't
need a supernatural being or magic pixies or lepre cons to be moral. What
you need is just the society that says it's bad to do harm to other
people, you know, and then people will be inculcated into that idea,
you know. And that's what we need to do. And we need to
get this Christian national takeover the schools in the trash as fast as we can.
So agreed, you know. With that being said, I guess I'm
going to hand it to you, Cynthia, to take us out. I
guess sure, Yes, let's all go to a restaurant. It's on me.
I'll get on a plane. I'll be there. Yeah, exactly,
get on a plane, come on down. I'll take you out for dinner
or something, you know. I want to go back to something that you
mentioned, Jonathan, about how communism in the modern not not necessarily the concept,
but in practice, how it became an agaalous to atheist and one of
the things that I've heard when I used to be a Christian and I used
to watch Trinity Broadcasting Network with Paul Crouch and jam Crouch when she had purple
hair that they talked about when the Soviet Union was still in you know,
still around and what have you. And and they used to go to some
of the summits and and they would talk about, yeah, she had purple
hair. Come on, y'all, she you know, she had purple hair.
But anyway, they But but the thing about it is is that like
I remember, specifically Paul Krouch talking about, like how these particular regimes like
the USS are because it was a communist state, and China was a communist
state and it was without God. Then you know, if the United States
actually adapted these particular practices, that that's what we would become, right and
and and and I think that the problem that is often conflated with atheism is
I believe it's called statu us statu literally stattra litery. My mouth is not
working right now, but it's basically, but it's st a t o l
a t r y And it's literally the worship of the state, analogous to
idolatry, worship of idols. So the glorification and the the ingrandizement of the
state or the nation is what we are actually aspiring to as a human collective
rather than something else. And this is what we have in in North Korea,
and this is what we had in the USSR. And this is where
we had, you know, because like one of the things that I even
said to other people when you know, when they talked about, oh,
that Darren's socialism, that's what the atheists want. You know, you left
this comedy Pink goes and I ses, I believe pink all day. But
that's just me. But regardless of that, we never really had a state
of government where true communism and socialism was practice. You never had it,
never had it. This it was just concepts that were actually used in order
for you know, as far as like oh I cannot talk, I'm getting
Jonathan's disease. But yes, we wanted to use no worries I have this
disease all the time. I was about to say, you've got cynthiast disease.
Regardless, they use these thank you, Phil. They use these particular
concepts in order for them to garner power. This is a dictatorship. This
is this is you know, true fascists, and this is something that you
know, we're constantly like you know, fighting to this particular day because we
don't want it, but you know, the article it actually brings up,
you know, the whole thing about you know, is morality objective versus uh
subjective? And is it relative? Do we have free will? What is
the epistemic conflict versus the ontological conflict? Oh? My goodness, I just
got triggered. Is doctor William Lane Craig in the room. I feel the
klam coming down any moment exactly. But you know these are all like the
you know, the very the very things that we hear on some of our
column shows that come on on Sundays one at one pm Central Standard Time,
Talk Heathen and also the eighth these Experience at four thirty pm instance of a
central time where you can have these particular arguments with the hosts. All you
want to bring up the ontological argument in the colom cosological argument, and the
whole thing about free will and realism all until you want, regardless, that
is not going to actually solve the whole issue about morality being subjective versus objective.
And I am of the mind that morality is not objective. It is
very subject to the individual and how we have been indoctrinate, like Johnathan said,
into society. But I'm of the mind of like Sam Harris, even
though like I'm not a fan anymore. But when it comes to his when
he said that morality and ethics are actually driven by well being, I agree
with that. We can't live in a society or without laws and without some
type of you know, rule that we're supposed to be going through. Its
anarchy is not the way. Sorry Essex And if you don't, don't,
who know who Essex is. It's a T ANDG reference. Look it up
my Star Trek people will know. But if we had any type of giving
up God belief, and I think that that's something that's happening as time goes
on, as we gain more knowledge and as we have regulated certain things that
we thought was God to an actual natural phenomena, then we can also see
that in order for us to consider ourselves moral ethical beings, we don't need
a supernatural divining rod to And with that being said, if you want another
divining rod that's actually naturally imposed, that just means that you want to listen
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