For some time now I’ve been planning on blogging about a YouTube video, not because I have some burning desire to turn this site into an apologetics blog (if I only respond to atheism would I ever be recogizable as an apologetics blog? Isn’t apologetics a series of rants against other Christians for being compromised or for not engaging in the right apologetics methodology?), but because the video itself was so depressing. I don’t mean that the truth is depressing and only the brave can face the truth. I mean it was depressing in its utter contempt for a coherent message or argument.

But I haven’t had time.

However, I see Doug Wilson has begun responding to Sam Harris. And it begins by pointing out a similar incoherency.

But that, actually, was the surprising thing. You disapproved that kind of hateful behavior too. You used a number of words that clearly portrayed that disapproval — “hostile, “murderously,” “disturbed,” “hatred.” I could not get to your second page without encountering a cluster of indignant moral judgments, and I am genuinely curious as to what you could possibly offer as the basis for these judgments. Pick the nastiest letter you got from the nastiest Christian out there. As a pastor, I know what I would say to him about it. But what could you say to him? He is just doing his thing. Two hundred years from now, when both you and he have returned to the soil, what difference does it make? There is no judgment, no standard, no law that overarchees the two of you. When this nasty Christian dies, you don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing that he will finally discover the error of his ways. He will discover nothing of the kind. His eyes will close, and that will be that. The material universe will not give everyone thirty minutes after death to readjust their thoughts on the subject before they pass into final oblivion. So why, on your terms, should he have written you a nice letter? I think he should have, but then again, I’m the pastor guy.

In different ways, this same issue is going to come up again and again. You want Christians to quit behaving in certain ways. But why? You want them to write nice letters, and you want them to stop turning America into a big, dumb theocracy. But why? If there is no God, what could possibly be wrong with theocracies? They provide high entertainment value, and they give everybody involved in them a sense of dignity and high moral purpose. You get to wear ecclesiastical robes, march in impressive processions to burn intransigent people at the stake, you get to believe you are better than everybody else, and, at the top of the doctrinal heap, that God likes you. Further, the material universe doesn’t care about any of this foolishness, not even a little bit. So what’s wrong with having a little bit of fun at the expense of other bits of protoplasm? Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Pol Pot, Mother Teresa, Mao, Nancy Pelosi, Stalin, Ted Haggard, and the Grand Inquistor are all just part of a gaudy, and very temporary, show. Sometimes the Northern lights put on a show in the sky. Sometimes people put on a show on the ground. Then the sun goes out, and it turns out nobody cares.

One casual observation: I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other reaction from an atheist (bear in mind my experience is limited) who ever responded to the quesiton, no matter how gently put, of an objective basis for ethical judgments, without getting angry. In a way, I can sympathize since, at bottom, ethics has to be somehow immediately evident or else it simply doesn’t work. More later perhaps.