Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?

Stone Island said:
That's the thing, the truth of their statement is self-evident. That's the rub. Can an atheist accept any moral proposition as self-evident?
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Yes. There's only one thing atheists can't do because of their status as atheists, and that is believe in a god.
Stone Island said:
Why doesn't an atheist believe in God or gods? Is there a reason?
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There is no reason common to all atheists. Some might have one reason, some might have another, some might have more than one reason, some might have no reason. There is only one thing all atheists have in common, and this isn't it.
Or, Neuhaus is operating under the assumption that there is a reason for an atheist to reject the notion of God.
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Perhaps - that would be consistent with Neuhaus' general wrongness.
As for the other, Neuhaus again argues that "produce member of society" sets the bar too low. A Good citizen is someone who can give a morally compelling account of his country. This allows us to see that a bad German (circa 1933-1945) might be better in some absolute sense than even a good American (circa 1945-2008). A positive productive member of a bad society isn't necessarily a very good thing, generally.
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Sure - I'm happy to let Neuhaus define "good citizen" any way he wants to, within reason. "Atheist" has a set meaning, and it's dishonest to try to shift it around. "Good citizen" is somewhat subjective, and it's fair for Neuhaus to say that it's more than, or less than, or different from, simply "productive member of society." The problem for Neuhaus is that, unless you define "good citizen" to require theism, which he does not do, you can't show that it's impossible for an atheist to be a good citizen. Which is why Neuhaus fails.
Stone Island said:
Except that being an atheist implies the rejection of beliefs without justification.
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No.
It also implies the rejection of non-scientific claims.
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No.
"Self-evident" means accepted as true without evidence; axiomatic.
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Axiomatic, yes. Accepted without evidence, no. If it were without evidence, it would be non-evident, like god. It is evident in itself. Self-evident.
Stone Island said:
In other words, an atheist could lack belief in any number of gods, without reason (Martin argues that they don't even have the burden of proof)
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Atheism is not a claim, it is a belief (actually, a lack of a belief). No proof is needed; no burden exists. Some atheists make claims, but atheists, as a group, make no claims.
, and then believe in something truly unusual, that had never in the history of the world been the propositional basis of a nation, without reason. Is that what you're saying?
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Is there a problem with that?
How is the argument for natural law systematically different than the argument for belief in God or gods?
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Why does it need to be? Atheism isn't an argument. It isn't a system of reasoning. It doesn't require you to disbelieve in natural law. It doesn't require consistency (although I'm sure many atheists are consistent). All it requires is disbelief in gods.


It was interesting to see Prof. Strang name-checked a few pages back. I was actually considering going down the hall to his office to ask him if he thought an atheist could be a good citizen. Unfortunately, I've never met the man, and it would have been kind of strange. Also, his answer doesn't really matter. It would have been interesting, though.


It's really precious how you compared yourself to Socrates in order to avoid answering a simple, direct question. I've read Socrates (actually Plato, obviously), I've been the victim of socratic method, and you, Stone Island, are no Socrates.

Here's what I think is going on here:

If you say yes, you'll be embarrassed because we've "won" and you've "lost" and you've wasted all this time and all these pages on an idea that you now admit doesn't really hold water.

If you say no, you'll be embarrassed because you've said something that a child would recognize as patently untrue. We know you know it's untrue, and you know we know you know it's untrue. It's embarrassing to be forced to say such an obvious untruth in a pathetic attempt to save face.

So you continue to dodge. This is embarrassing too, of course, but we know people have a preference to stick with a lousy status quo rather than move to a lousy alternative.

What to do? Just say yes. It may feel embarrassing at first, but it's actually admirable for someone to admit he was wrong. It's actually good to learn new things. Sure, some might gloat, but in the end, they're forced to respect your honesty and reasonableness. As opposed to what's happening now, where this is just a joke that's getting less and less funny.


Stone Island, can atheists be good citizens?
 
linusrichard said:
So you continue to dodge. This is embarrassing too, of course, but we know people have a preference to stick with a lousy status quo rather than move to a lousy alternative.

What to do? Just say yes. It may feel embarrassing at first, but it's actually admirable for someone to admit he was wrong. It's actually good to learn new things. Sure, some might gloat, but in the end, they're forced to respect your honesty and reasonableness. As opposed to what's happening now, where this is just a joke that's getting less and less funny.
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quoted for truth.

This is extremely important, Stone Island. I hope you recognize this fact.
 
A lot of waffle and fluff in this article, but here is where the peddle hits the metal:
A good citizen does more than abide by the laws. A good citizen is able to give an account, a morally compelling account, of the regime of which he is part. He is able to justify its defense against its enemies, and to convincingly recommend its virtues to citizens of the next generation so that they, in turn, can transmit the regime to citizens yet unborn.
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The irony is that it is so morally uncompelling - repellent even - that he should seek to exclude a class of citizens based upon religious grounds - what sort of a country does he think America is?

He seems to think that important feature of his nation is it's religious heritage, conveniently ignoring the fact that for centuries prior Christianity had enthusiatically thrown in it's lot with tyrants and established tyrannies of its own. He is happy to claim credit for individual freedom and democracy to Christianity although this religion had never before even made the slightest hint that it was interested in such things (although it had ample opportunity to coax monarchies to divest their power).

And let's not forget the pusillanimity of Christians such as Falwell who panicked in the face of 9/11 and started turning on their fellow Americans rather than the terrorists who had committed the act.

Well here in Australia we don't care much that you could spin the fancy words about our country that Neuhaus would require from American citizens.

Actions speak louder than words - if you can demonstrate good citizenship you are a good citizen and if self-important religious bigots don't think so - that is their problem.
 
Neuhaus said:
But there is, I believe. reason to fear that theism, when it plays by the rules of the atheism of unreason, will be corrupted and eviscerated. The method becomes the message. Contemporary Christian theology already provides all too many instances of the peddling of truths that are in service to truths other than the truth of God.
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Neuhaus said:
When the regime forgets itself and reestablishes the gods of the civitas, even if it be in the name of liberal democracy, the followers of the God of Abraham have no choice but to invite the opprobrium of once again being “atheists.”
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[boldface mine]

God, God, always the big-G God of the Bible with this guy. This is the god the author wants to insinuate into the DoI, clearly. And there's the fatal contradiction in Neuhaus' polemic, too. I think other posters have touched on this already, several times -- bokonon & the esteemed Prof "Grinspittle", Foster Zygote, robin -- but at the risk of beating a dead Neuhaus... his essay, for all its pedantic camouflage, really does appear to accidentally prove the exact opposite of what he intends. Which ought to win him top spot on Academia's Funniest Auto-Ad Hominems, or the booby prize, or something.

As any good citizen of the USofA must know, the "God" (Creator, actually) in the DoI is the inspirator and guarantor of the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Neuhaus takes great pains in his essay to imply this can be none other than the Abrahamic God of the Bible (coincidentally, the same God Neuhaus happens to believe in -- what are the odds! -- some theists would no doubt share his bias -- for as a believer Neuhaus is committed to this God alone). But is it? Is Yahweh the God of the DoI ("Dewey" from here on)? Is Yahweh Dewey?

God grants all men "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" it says. Does that sound like Yahweh? Does Yahweh anywhere in the Bible espouse such faith in individual freedoms? In the great moral code that he gives to Moses, is there any mention of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Are we sure one can be derived from the other, that the Decalogue amounts to LLatPoH? And even if it does in part, where's the rest of it then? Where's "worship no other gods before Me"? I think Yahweh makes this rule #1 originally; would He leave it off His New World shopping list entirely? Moreover, would He then go on to inspire the constitutional passages on the right to freedom of religion: to believe in any god you want, to "worship other gods before Me"? It's problematic, don't you think? I do; Neuhaus doesn't: carried away by the brain-numbing bouquet of his own flowery rhetoric in his 'reluctant' headlong rush to expunge atheists from civil society and enshrine his own brand of Theism, he hasn't a clue he's headed off a cliff. Or the edge of his flat earth worldview.

Possible response: this is the God of the Bible, but He's changed. He's clearly taken some sensitivity training, maybe dabbled in nature worship, backpacked through Europe, read a lot of self-help books, eaten a lot of granola, finally gotten in touch with His inner God, gotten to know the real Yahweh.
Ok. Maybe. Maybe God has changed. But if so, can one base the axioms of a society on Him? For if He's subject to change, who's to say He won't again, or hasn't already, into a being with no interest whatsoever in granting man the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"?

Clearly, that option is out. The god of the DoI, Dewey, and Constitution (Connie?) is not the God of the Old and New Testament, Yahweh. Rather, the "god" of the DoI is just that, the god of the DoI, no more, no less. It is a word invoked by the authors of the document to ground their document in Reason; the 18th century practice of deifying reason and nature and science and custom, of naming morality "god" (Major hint in the preamble: "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- Spinoza was excommunicated as an 'atheist' for as much). As philosophers, we must not be confused by spelling; we must be deaf to appeals to the authority of this or that founder, whose opinions on god varied, who represent a consensus, compromise, a democracy themselves, document co-authors, not owners; we must be swayed only by logic. So. A is A. Dewey is Dewey. Dewey is not Yahweh. The god of the DoI is not the God of the Bible.

Now here's the problem: Neuhaus has argued quite stridently that the god of the DoI must be the God of the Bible. We have seen that's not true. Neuhaus has also argued that an atheist might be someone who doesn't believe in the god(s) of the state. Neuhaus, in asserting that Yahweh is Dewey, is obviously deluded. He doesn't really believe in the real Dewey then, the god of the DoI, and thus doesn't believe in the god of the state, the civitas. For if the US has a "god" of the civitas, it is Dewey, not Yahweh. Therefore, Neuhaus is, according to his own definitions, atheos, godless (Dewey-less), and by his own admission (2nd quote above) not a citizen at all (as are any other Americans who have mistaken Yahweh for Dewey)!
As much as it pains us, we must conclude then, by Neuhaus' argument, that he and many US theists, perhaps most, are not citizens.
This surely is a dire result for the democracy. A nation of hundreds of millions of delusional non-citizens. Where shall America turn in its hour of need? Who shall It look to? Who shall preserve the precarious Union?

Atheists of course need not be bothered by the semantics of Yahweh and Dewey. They assumed all along that "Dewey" was "Dewey", the lingua franca for reason etal. in 1775, and if there's one thing most atheists believe in, it's reason. It's "Dewey". It's the principles of science and nature and the morality of humans, like the humans who drafted the morals in the Constitution. Plenty if one need believe in some higher authority to be a good citizen. Furthermore, atheists need not base their belief in the American experiment on "Dewey" alone, though that's part of it; they supplement deduction from axioms with induction from experience, the collective experience of two and a quarter centuries of successful union; the American experience. History is their evidence, their verification, that their trust in Dewey is justified. And as part of a continuing history, everything they do according to Dewey's principles, is further proof. They are their own stake in the game of LLatPoH, and they play for keeps. I can't imagine a better citizen, or one I'd trust more, than one who, serving her own ends, with full knowledge of that her life and liberty are her own in pursuit of her own happiness, serves everyone's. That is the root of democracy, capitalism, freedom, the Union, the whole nine yards, isn't it? If "Dewey" were more than an antiquarian axiomatic bluff, It would be proud.

Of atheists, that is. Not Neuhaus; that mofo's crazy!
 
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blobru said:
God grants all men "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" it says. Does that sound like Yahweh? Does Yahweh anywhere in the Bible espouse such faith in individual freedoms? In the great moral code that he gives to Moses, is there any mention of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Are we sure one can be derived from the other, that the Decalogue amounts to LLatPoH?
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And not even the NT amounts to this "hate your family and hate your own life"
(Major hint in the preamble: "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- Spinoza was excommunicated as an 'atheist' for as much). As philosophers, we must not be confused by spelling; we must be deaf to appeals to the authority of this or that founder, whose opinions on god varied, who represent a consensus, compromise, a democracy themselves, document co-authors, not owners; we must be swayed only by logic. So. A is A. Dewey is Dewey. Dewey is not Yahweh. The god of the DoI is not the God of the Bible.
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Thomas Paine was a major inspiration behind the DoI and was a Deist who declared that it was ridiculous to suppose that God had a Son.
Atheists of course need not be bothered by the semantics of Yahweh and Dewey.
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Don't forget Louie - Yahweh, Dewey and Louie.
I can't imagine a better citizen, or one I'd trust more, than one who, serving her own ends, with full knowledge of that her life and liberty are her own in pursuit of her own happiness, serves everyone's. That is the root of democracy, capitalism, freedom, the Union, the whole nine yards, isn't it? If "Dewey" were more than an antiquarian axiomatic bluff, It would be proud.

Of atheists, that is. Not Neuhaus; that mofo's crazy!
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It would probably be proud of him too - freedom of speech extends even to gibberish.
 
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But to summarise, we have learned that:

1. Positive Atheism is absolute rot because religious language is meaningless
2. Good citizenship is necessarily founded on religion

Substituting it becomes clear that good citizenship is necessarily founded on meaningless language.

And the DoI is meaningless.

Stone Island - do you have a point with all this stuff you are citing?
 
In short: Yes, they can.

The longer answer is of course that in the modern state only the citizenship matters. You don't have to be of a certain religius faith nor do you have to be an atheist to make a good citizen. A good citizen, regardless of faith, is one who engages actively in society and such. And atheists can do this as well as religius people can.
 
joobz said:
Well, that's simply because the Godless in the Netherlands don't consider baby eating as abortions. If you included those numbers, .....
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Thanks for pointing out the stats. Let me elaborate on Sweden a bit (I don't know that much about the Netherlands) The swedish figures have increased over the last ten or so years from about NL figures, largely it can be argued, due to two factors: 1. Sexual education was removed from the curriculum (causing an increase in STDs as well as an increase in teen pregnancies, and abortions) 2. an influx of religious citizens who do not approve of planned parenthood or premarital sex - paradoxically, to the children of religious people, completing an unplanned pregnancy seems to be less of an option. Sweden has been hit by the religion stick backlash lately (a lot of people now describe themselves as "spritual" when not adhering to a specific religion). Mind you, I am not claiming causality as noone has bothered to do any research on this. (sensitive issue) I just want to point out that increasing abortion numbers and increasing religiousness happened in parallell in Sweden.
 
Stone Island said:
Except that being an atheist implies the rejection of beliefs without justification.
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WOW. Did you really just say that? How about this, Stoney? "Being a Theist implies the acceptance of the existance of an imaginary magical being without justification."

Also, I want you to get your opinion flat out and on the table.
Stone, can Atheists be good citizens?
 
Stone Island said:
What if they don't believe in natural law either, Articulett? Is there any evidence for it? As you said, they can't make themselves believe. I mean, there's a lot of people who have convinced each other that they have some idea of what it means, but even they don't fully agree with one another.

How does anyone come to believe in natural law? Is it merely arbitrary?

In other words, an atheist could lack belief in any number of gods, without reason (Martin argues that they don't even have the burden of proof), and then believe in something truly unusual, that had never in the history of the world been the propositional basis of a nation, without reason. Is that what you're saying?

How is the argument for natural law systematically different than the argument for belief in God or gods?
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Who the hell said anything about natural laws ?

Atheist = lack of belief in god. That's all there is to it.
 
Rakove, Jack N. writes in Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,
And to less partisan observers, such as Thomas Haskell, "the curious persistence of rights talk in the 'age of interpretation'' raises a further puzzle: If the very concept of rights presupposes "the existence of an objective moral order accessible to reason," how can "rights-talk" flourish in an intellectual culture that treats all claims of this nature skeptically?
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Turning to Haskell's article (The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No.s 3, Dec., 1987, pp. 984-1012), we find these questions:

To be conscious of a right is at least tacitly to lay claim to a kind of knowledge that is not merely personal and subjective but impersonal and objective. When I say that I have a right to do something--whether it is to exercise dominion over a possession, to enjoy equal employment opportunities, or to express controversial opinions in public--I am not merely saying that I want to do it and hope others will let me; I am saying that they ought to let me, have a duty to let me, and will be guilty of an injustice, a transgression against established moral standards, if they fail to do so.

Does the objective (or at least intersubjective) moral order implied by words such as "ought" and "duty" really exist? Can there be any intellectually respectable justification for the claim "I have a right"? Or is rights talk nothing more than a fancy cloak for the interests of individuals and groups?
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Since some claim that atheism is nothing more than the lack of belief, all I can ask is, is there any non-arbitrary reason to be an atheist? Is there any content to atheism? How is being an atheist less arbitrary than being a theist?
 
Stone Island said:
Since some claim that atheism is nothing more than the lack of belief, all I can ask is, is there any non-arbitrary reason to be an atheist? Is there any content to atheism? How is being an atheist less arbitrary than being a theist?
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I'll answer your questions on the condition that you answer the question, the ONE question asked to you by almost everyone else in the thread.

Do you believe atheists can be good citizens?
 
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