Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?

I said form of government, not actual government.

I don't actually consider that Florida law a debacle - ill-advised, but not a debacle. What was a debacle was in 2000 when the state knowingly used an inaccurate list of "felons" and prevented thousands of non-felons from voting. What made it more of a debacle is that aside from paying a settlement to the NAACP, they got away with it - the press ignored it and the person most culpable for it, Katherine Harris, went on to get elected to Congress.
 
Government base on humanism as in based on the idea that every human should be treated as having inherent worth and dignity? The way I've been hearing it the only moral philosophy atheists are allowed to hold is utilitarianism, won't the atheist inquisition be at our door if we espouse humanism on anything other than utilitarian grounds?
 
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I think Stone Island wants us to explain how we can subscribe to humanism without basing it on fact statements. Personally I don't. How I act towards others is based on "should" statements, not "is" statements. Nothing in nature tells me I "should" do anything. That's something each of us has to decide for ourselves.
 
Ah, but that's the rub, Dave. People like Stone Island don't think humans should think for themselves. We're all lackeys of the big sky-daddy, after all.
 
The skeptic atheist citizen of the US says "I prefer to live in a country where the concept of human rights is respected, where those rights are protected and respected by the government."

The believer in natural law citizen of the US says "I have faith that there is a natural law that says humans should have certain rights and that good governments protect and respect them."

The problem for Neuhaus's argument, as articulated by Stone Island, is that a statement of faith is no less arbitrary than a statement of preference. The believer in natural law cannot offer any evidence that this law exists and says what he believes it says. So if skeptic atheists cannot be good citizens of the US because they cannot make a morally compelling, non-arbitrary defense for their country's form of government, then believers in natural law can't be good citizens either, for exactly the same reason.
 
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godless dave said:
The skeptic atheist citizen of the US says "I prefer to live in a country where the concept of human rights is respected, where those rights are protected and respected by the government."

The believer in natural law citizen of the US says "I have faith that there is a natural law that says humans should have certain rights and that good governments protect and respect them."

The problem for Neuhaus's argument, as articulated by Stone Island, is that a statement of faith is no less arbitrary than a statement of preference. The believer in natural law cannot offer any evidence that this law exists and says what he believes it says. So if skeptic atheists cannot be good citizens of the US because they cannot make a morally compelling, non-arbitrary defense for their country's form of government, then believers in natural law can't be good citizens either, for exactly the same reason.
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This is, of course, the nub.

I posted it elsewhere, but there is something that Dr. Harry Neumann, an avowed nihilist, wrote that I liked very much:

In reality's void, all choices are arbitrary. I choose to encourage political, rather than Christian-liberal, decisions by Americans. They should be educated to realize that their political enemies at home and abroad cannot be their private friends. If Russia is to be defeated, Americans must be taught to think politically, not privately.

The heart of politics is not prudent or pious calculation of private interest. Prudence is only a means to political ends. The heart of politics or morality is clear in General Spears's description of the spirit informing Clemenceau's life and death (Assignment to Catastrophe,Vol. II, p. 238). When the French forces were awaiting Ludendorff's attack in 1918, they had left a large zone in front of their main line garrisoned by a few troops with orders to stand and die (in order to trick the Germans into believing that this was the main French force). Clemenceau visited the doomed troops.

He spoke to them in his gruff way, not minimizing the sacrifice being asked of them. Their fate would have been his had he had his way, and the men knew it. They said nothing but presented him with a bouquet of such wild flowers as grow on the parapets of trenches. . . . Clemenceau, who was the toughest, the hardest and perhaps the most cruel man I have ever met, who had but one love, France, sobbed. . . . When he died, that faded posy was found in his desk with the instruction that when he was buried standing, as was his wish, it should be placed over his heart.
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Who are the atheists who aren't skeptics?

Even an a-astrologer, to go contrary to Harris's explanation, while perhaps not thinking about it much, can at least implicitly or theoretically give an account of the world to explain her a-astrology. Scientific explanations work like this, this is the data we have, these are the theories we're using that explain the data we have, and, given our explanatory theories, this is what we will expect to see when we get more data, and astrology doesn't fit any of it.

Is a non-skeptical atheist someone who could conceivably accept God talk as meaningful and true but happens to find it meaningful and false in certain particular instances? Perhaps that's what Neuhaus meant when he described how Christians were atheists with regard to the particular pantheon of Rome.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Raelians and Scientologists leap immediately to mind. Also, someone could simply choose to be atheistic without thinking skeptically about the matter.
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Also...

All children up to around the age of five (maybe older?) are too innocent to be anything other than atheists and yet they are blindly accepting (non-sceptical) of what they are told by their 'nearest and dearest'

Are they - simply by virtue of being atheists - to be labelled as bad citizens, too?
 
Well they are lousy citizens: they don't vote, they don't pay taxes, they don't give to charity......
 
Neumann said:
They should be educated to realize that their political enemies at home and abroad cannot be their private friends. If Russia is to be defeated, Americans must be taught to think politically, not privately.
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What a profoundly undemocratic and politically obtuse thing to say.

The genius of modern democracy is precisely that your political enemies can be your friends.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Raelians and Scientologists leap immediately to mind. Also, someone could simply choose to be atheistic without thinking skeptically about the matter.
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Or they were never exposed to the idea of gods as children, but weren't raised to think skeptically either.
 
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