Is eating your children only a legal issue?

If not for laws making it illegal, atheists should be consistent and affirm eating your children is as acceptable as eating any other living things. You might claim we should protect all animal life or you may have some standard by which you decide which animals are expendable for food or other reasons (crop harming insects for instance) and which are too advanced (able to feel) or just too "cute" to kill or consume.

I would propose that it is impossible to live in our culture without killing some animals for some reasons. If it is OK to kill a chicken and eat it, then why not a child? You might say you are exempt form this reasoning because you are a vegetarian and would never advocate killing/eating a chicken, but are you really being consistent in your treatment of animals? Do you kill insects that invade your home, bacteria that invade your body or cause the death of animals through your part in polluting the environment? Are some kinds of life of greater or lesser value - says who?

As one famous animal rights expert put it -

"There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.” — Ingrid Newkirk, Washingtonian magazine, Aug 1986

Newkirk was trying to make a case for animal rights by suggesting we have just as much reason for protecting the rights of rats as children. She has a point, but unless their is some absolute moral standard from which we derive things like rights then she may be making the opposite point - if we have no basis for rights for rats then there is no basis for rights for people either.

Unless God has spoken, as the Christians claim, then any distinction between mammals and bacteria as worthy of rights is completely arbitrary. If you are to be totally true to an atheistic/evolutionary worldview, it would be wrong to distinguish even plant life or rocks from the sphere of rights as they all equally exist as products of the amoral process of time and chance acting on matter. Of course the rights they have is not the right to exist without being harmed, but the right or even obligation to consume each other as much as they are able as part of the evolutionary process.

If God has not spoken and given us specific information on morality as it relates to the world, then there is no basis for even having such discussions of "rights". Survival of the fittest must prevail and if it were legal to eat your children, no one could make any kind of moral argument regarding the rightness or wrongness of it.

If atheists were to act more like atheists and less like Christians (living like morals were real/absolute) we may not have survived long enough as a species to have these kinds of discussion (our parents may have eaten us), but do you want to be a consistent atheist or live?





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Human Rights - Really?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Sound familiar?

It is from the Declaration of Independence.

Clearly, the Founding Fathers were aware that "human rights" could only be grounded in the reality of some higher authority whom they called "their  Creator". The majority assumed this creator had mandated these things for His creation and revealed it in the Bible.

We can be free of this Christian "human rights" nonsense if we will only think logically!

It is clear that unless a higher authority/creator tells us what is true, good, right, etc. in some absolute/concrete way, such as in a written document like the Bible, then "human rights" is nothing more than one or more persons' opinion of what ought to be in a world without oughts!

If we reject the notion of a creator/God we are free from "human rights".

Let me give a practical example -

Suppose ten people find themselves stuck on an island cut off from all other people, governments and laws. For the sake of argument, five are adult men, two are adult women and three are children age 9-11 (two girls and one boy).

Even though there is no moral basis for a majority vote for making decisions (evolution would not account for it), it is decided that they will vote to decide how things are to be run on the island. The five men decide they want the others to be their salves, in even the most heinous/unspeakable ways, so they convince one of the children to vote with them and the majority's will becomes law on the island. 

The women and children now find they have been voted into slavery by the majority. Removed from other laws/governments that dictate behavior and punish lawbreakers, can these slaves make any claim of their "human rights" being violated?

Most would say pedophilia is obviously wrong everywhere all the time, but lets be consistent atheists and acknowledge all morall standards are subjective and simply based on the standards particular societies have chosen. Therefore, slavery or pedophelia are simply the acceptable moral standard this society has voted into law.

This is even being generous, because in reality the will of any two of the castaways might just as well dictate accepted morality for this small society, if they are strong enough to force their will on the others. As I alluded to earlier, even voting can't be called "right" unless it is anchored in some higher authority/creator.

It is true that these kinds of things have happened many times throughout history and have often been called evil or even atrocities, but now we see that even the condemning of these actions is baseless when God is rejected.

"Human rights" as a concept doesn't even make sense if we (humans) are simply products of time and random chance on matter!

It is clear the Founding Fathers knew the consequences of a godless society and wrote the founding documents of our nation based on their strong religious (mostly Christian) beliefs, but now we can be free by following atheism to it's logical end and get in the process -

A world without any basis for "human rights"!

If you end up a slave in the process - I guess you can't complain, accept to time and chance acting on matter!

Free From Final Justice - Woopee!

Not that I believe the categories of fair, right or justice are anything more than human constructs, but isn't it good to know they have only very limited and temporary influence on us!

Seriously, don't you want to rest easy knowing that if you beat the system here, you have truly and finally gotten away with it? It would really stink to think you/others would one day have to give an account for all the "evil" you have done. The truth is, if you murder someone and get off on a technicality you are totally free, of course there is no guilty feelings as nothing is really bad in any absolute sense, but also we have none of the perfect justice of God, final judgement stuff the Christians get from their Bible.

Isn't it much less complicated and even fun to live in a world where if you can pay off the police, strong arm a judge or threaten a jury and be let off and then you really are "innocent", since the human legal system is all there is!

If you really did do something the legal system or those moralistic Christians call evil, it is nice to know that saying your sorry or making amends is useless and unnecessary. I mean really, if there is no moral absolutes or final judgement beyond this life, it would be hypocritical to try to make up for something that is only between you and the legal system.

Atheism is hard to live out sometimes, but can't you see the wonderful world it brings about!

My bad, I mean the world we can make no judgements of good (wonderful, for example) or bad about. It is really hard to discuss anything without using language which makes value/moral judgments about things!

I will try to do better - @&$!* I did it again...