Perkins vs. D'Souza: Morality

In his fourth essay criticizing Dinesh D'Souza, Greg Perkins notes that D'Souza accuses atheists of rebelling against moral rules. After summarizing why that's not the case for atheists who know what they're talking about, Perkins adds:

[T]he religionists are themselves guilty of the sin of moral subjectivism. The essence of subjectivism is acting on whim -- wishing, assuming, feeling, or declaring that facts will align themselves with thoughts and lives. Of course, this gets it exactly backwards: thoughts and lives must align themselves with the facts because facts are absolutes to be discovered, not declared. Merely hoping or asserting something is good doesn't make it so, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the whim of a lone subjectivist deciding what is good or bad, the whim of an entire civilization voting on it, or the whim of a "supernatural" mind decreeing it. So the religious who claim to have an absolute morality are really only subjectivists of a supernatural stripe. The trouble for them is that their sort of subjectivism is just as false as any other: God telling Abraham that it is good to slay his innocent son Isaac doesn't make it good. His ordering the enslavement of entire peoples in the Old Testament doesn't make that good.

While Perkins only hints at the full case behind his arguments, he starts down the right track and offers a useful reading list.

There is a point that Perkins doesn't make: D'Souza is psychologizing. He is postulating some psychological rebellion that, in most cases, simply does not exist. (Perkins correctly claims that many atheists resort to the theory of subjectivism, but that's a very different charge.) Thus, D'Souza's argument on this point is not only wrong but ad hominem.

Norris: Christian Ranger

Ordinarily, I don't care what actors think about politics. But I do care about actors who espouse popular conservative views on popular conservative forums. Especially when those actors endorse relatively successful politicians who promise us faith-based politics.

Townhall.com has published at least a couple of Chuck Norris's articles praising Mike Huckabee. Here is one segment from Norris's recent piece about murder in our society:

We teach our children they are nothing more than glorified apes, yet we don't expect them to act like monkeys. We place our value in things, yet expect our children to value people. We disrespect one another, but expect our children to respect others. We terminate children in the womb, but are surprised when children outside the womb terminate other children. We push God to the side, but expect our children to be godly. We've abandoned moral absolutes, yet expect our children to obey the universal commandment: "Thou shall not murder."

Once we weed out the platitudes, we are left with the following substantive claims: the teaching of evolution as science, abortion, irreligion, and moral non-absolutism are responsible for murder.

In other words, Norris believes that those who reject mythological explanations of the creation of the world and of life, those who find a distinction between a fertilized egg and a person, and those who decline to subordinate their lives to an invented supernatural being, all promote murder. And let's not look at the history of what those who believe the opposite tend to do.

Norris also wishes us to believe that the foundation of moral absolutism is mythology and supernaturalism. Perhaps it requires the sensibilities of one trained in the art of make-believe to see beyond the distinction between rigorously imposed religious rules and objective moral absolutes.

But Norris delivers the knock-out blow in his closing paragraph: "If Psalm 33:12 says, 'Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,' then what will be the state of blessedness for the nation that abandons God and his moral code of conduct?" Who can argue with logic like that?