Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?

KingMerv00 said:
Amy called those countries "crime-ridden" and implied that it was because they were "godless".

Those countries have lower crime rates, ergo godlessness is obviously not the determining factor.

Edit: Whoops. She didn't imply it. She outright said it.
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OK, my speed reading of Amy's rubbish cost me understanding. My bad, thanks for the heads up.

DR
 
KingMerv00 said:
Oh thank God! I thought I had gone invisible for a sec there.

Maybe you could act as a "medium" (a la the movie "Ghost") and ask Stone a question for me.
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Only if it gets me a crack at the million!

Hell it's worth a shot though.

Stone:

Can atheists be good citizens?

Did Pat Tillman's atheism negate his exemplary citizenship?

Answer in that order.
 
Stone Island said:
Thanks, linusrichard.

Now this is a good point. It gets to the crux of the matter.

Can an atheist acknowledge a source of political authority higher than the self?
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I actually answered this in the section you quoted from me, but I'll say it again:

Yes.

I think my point #5 gets even more to the crux of the matter. Did you want to address that?
 
J.-J. Rousseau from On The Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 8:
But, setting aside political considerations, let us come back to what is right, and settle our principles on this important point. The right which the social compact gives the Sovereign over the subjects does not, we have seen, exceed the limits of public expediency.1 The subjects then owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions only to such an extent as they matter to the community. Now, it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion. That will make him love his duty; but the dogmas of that religion concern the State and its members only so far as they have reference to morality and to the duties which he who professes them is bound to do to others. Each man may have, over and above, what opinions he pleases, without it being the Sovereign’s business to take cognisance of them; for, as the Sovereign has no authority in the other world, whatever the lot of its subjects may be in the life to come, that is not its business, provided they are good citizens in this life.


There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.1 While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them—it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.


The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.


Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect;1 and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforth priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.
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Rousseau.jpg


Image and text from The Online Library of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Irrelevant. The Declaration of Independence is not a document of US government. A good citizen is expected to defend the US Constitution. Why could an atheist not defend the Constitution?
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I will pick another nit, if you will indulge me.

A good citizen would be expected to abide by the Constitution, or, to attempt to reform it (along with other like minded citizens) via the Constitutionally agreed process when said citizen is at odds with the Constitution's contents. (See women's suffrage for an example of said reform attempts.)

The only people I would expect to defend the Constitution would be those who so swore, like all members of Congress, Executive Branch, etc, who take official oaths to do so, and those inclined to defend its merits on political or philosophicls grounds.

That leaves a lot of perfectly good citizens who are content to simply acknowledge and abide by it, delegating to their duly elected officials, etcetera as above, the task of defending the Constitution.

@ Stone Island:

The Rousseau passage comes close to contradicting itself, between paragraph 2 and the end, but I won't derail into a critique of Rousseau. What I'd like to know, from you, is if you think Neuhaus isn't simply repackaging Rousseau for the 20th century audience.

The closing of your Rousseau snippet smacks Papist rhetoric, rhetoric antithetical to American Constitutional principles, but I digress.



DR
 
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Polaris said:
Only if it gets me a crack at the million!

Hell it's worth a shot though.

Stone:

Can atheists be good citizens?

Did Pat Tillman's atheism negate his exemplary citizenship?

Answer in that order.
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I'm freaking out here. How did you know what question I wanted to ask? Quick, get Randi!
 
Stone Island said:
In a commercial for some new drug, Jarvic talks about going into medicine because his father almost died of a heart attack. Is this revelation of his motivations important for evaluating the contributions of his research?

I would like to have the freedom to try out all sorts of different arguments without the constant, nagging insinuation that I'm contradicting myself (as if contradicting myself on an internet forum is some great sin). Some, like Foster Zygote, have already tried bringing up what I've said in other threads, as if that had any relevance to what Neuhaus said in his article.

I guess I don't know what you mean by a real discussion. A discussion about arguments is a real discussion. A discussion about my opinions is probably more akin to therapy. Let's try and be scientific and ignore our biases.
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In trying to discern your position on the mater of atheists and whether they can be good citizens, your prior comments to the effect that people despise atheists and child molesters are relevant. Were you not trying to imply that atheists deserve that hatred just as child molesters deserve theirs? The fact is that large majorities of people in various societies have hated groups like Africans, Jews, Shia, Catholics, Native Americans, etc. etc. etc. That does not indicate that those groups deserved to be hated, does it?
 
Darth Rotor said:
I beat him to the punch by quite a few posts. See post #9 of this thread, if you please.
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Yes, my quoting of FZ was with the implicit assumption that you had already provided examples of atheists who are good citizens. The best post I could have done would be to have quoted you after quoting the exchange of Stone Island's admission on how to disprove a statement and FZ's rewording of that admission.

Darth Rotor said:
I find the tactic of asking the question the questioner asks rarely effective, though it is now and again amusing.


DA: Did you kill Cock Robin?
Witness: Did you kill Cock Robin?
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Fortunately, no one is on trial here and it's extremely amusing to me that Stone Island refuses to address the question head on. It reeks of cowardice. I do not claim Stone is a coward, only that he's exhibiting the behaviors that one would expect an intellectual coward to have.

Truly, it seems he sees the logical contradiction he has created and any attempt to engage the question would require his admission of error. Since such admissions are rarely done, I do not ever expect him to actually answer the question.

However, if he does, I'd be happy to admit I was wrong.:D

Darth Rotor said:
We are at the point in this thread that Stone Island is having a bit of difficulty defending the article he presented, and having read the various narrow, inelegant, and at times petty posts in the thread, I wonder at why this scrum continues.

Oh, sorry, I forgot, we like to pick at scabs here on JREF forums. (Yes, I am among the guilty on that one, far too often.)

*sings*

Look for
The Union label
Or we'll kick your scab arse!
I love a running gag.
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Keeping on running, eventually we'll catch up.;)

Darth Rotor said:
Speaking of gags, was my golden shower on the Neuhaus article, post #9, so repulsive that you recoiled in horror? :eek:

DR
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Not at all. As a person whose socially moderate to liberal, I welcome any consenting adults to engage in nearly any sexual practice they find appropriate. I would not interfer with... Oh, wait. excuse me

*walks away from computer*
Yes mistress??--I have been a bad boy....
*walks back*

I'm sorry, I must go.
 
For the record Darth, I applaud you for taking this conversation with Stone more seriously than I am. Keep up the good work. On the other hand, my frustration is expressing itself as sarcasm. That doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate point.

Frankly, I don't think I'm being that funny anyway. The real humor comes from Stone pretending I'm not here.
 
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AmyWilson said:
America is one nation UNDER GOD. Atheists are not as patriotic as Christians are. If you hate God so much, than go to godless Sweden or the Netherlands, where its crime ridden, and abortions galore, because it doesn't believe in God.
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Recent statistics on percentage of pregnancies ended by abortion by country:

Sweden 25.3%
United States 23.9%
Netherlands 13%

Hmmmmmm...
 
Foster Zygote said:
Recent statistics on percentage of pregnancies ended by abortion by country:

Sweden 25.3%
United States 23.9%
Netherlands 13%

Hmmmmmm...
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Well, that's simply because the Godless in the Netherlands don't consider baby eating as abortions. If you included those numbers, .....
 
According to an article by Dr. Tom West I'm reading, John Adams wrote about the Declaration of Independence:
All this, is by the laws of nature and of nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of a God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon men, preceding all institutions of human society and government.
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Stone Island said:
On what basis could we reason about positions if our reasons made no deeper reference than to our preferences?

If you read the Declaration Independence then you'll know that the Supreme Judge of the World supports the principles therein because they're good. I suppose that even the Founders read The Euthyphro. We would lose the protection of divine providence, to which the appeal is made, if they were not.
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OK. So I read it (again).

Care to tell me where there is any Biblical or other support for: "If you read the Declaration Independence then you'll know that the Supreme Judge of the World supports the principles therein because they're good."?

It's not proved in the document and the "Divine Right of Kings" has excellent Biblical support -- "Render unto Caesar" and etc. :confused:
 
I'm curious to know, where the transcript of god saying that all men have certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the persuit of happiness?
 
Stone Island said:
According to an article by Dr. Tom West I'm reading, John Adams wrote about the Declaration of Independence:
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Jeez, now he is arguing by proxy by proxy by proxy by proxy by proxy by proxy by proxy by proxy.

1) Tom West writes about...

2) John Adams who wrote about...

3) The Declaration of Independence which was written by...

4) Thomas Jefferson and altered by...

5-8) the rest of the Committe of Five

I think Stone has become Borg.
 
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Gord_in_Toronto said:
OK. So I read it (again).

Care to tell me where there is any Biblical or other support for: "If you read the Declaration Independence then you'll know that the Supreme Judge of the World supports the principles therein because they're good."?

It's not proved in the document and the "Divine Right of Kings" has excellent Biblical support -- "Render unto Caesar" and etc. :confused:
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The 1st of Locke's Two Treatises of Government.
 
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