This is going to be less about religion than I’m probably leading you to believe.
A Christian (you know the one I’m talking about, don’t make this trend any more than it is, please) who is only being given media attention because he had a TV show (i.e. media attention) is being given more media attention, because P=m*v, and for all our country’s supposed piety, we treat theology as the functional equivalent celebrity gossip. Just because I’m not on team God does not mean I don’t find that to be insane, terrifying, and depressing. Anyway, according to media excerpts the bearded imago dei has made graphic comments about raping and murdering atheists, which is technically true but delivered in a way that is not meant to present his argument, but to imply that the guy is a raving lunatic with violent tendencies, and by extension that the people in the flyover states are as primitive as we all think they are.
Here’s the part that’s quoted, ICYMI:
“I’ll make a bet with you: Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?’…. Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if this [sic] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’…If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘something about this just ain’t right.”
Every article highlighted the same excerpt of a speech the guy made at a prayer breakfast thing in Florida that lasted over 45 minutes, linking to a soundcloud link from “Right Wing Watch” that has the dude saying the selected piece of text, which takes up like a minute. So the other 44 minutes don’t show up. So out of the half dozen or so links I clicked with the story, every outlet has picked the exact same text quote and spin. I realize this is an aside from a discussion on religion, but that is also insane, terrifying, and depressing. The thing is that this was being framed as a religious argument, and yet the media discussed essentially nothing about his religious arguments. They just copied someone else’s clip and stretched “res ipse loquitur” to 300 words. How are we okay with that paltry level of communication in society? Oh yeah, this is how you’re taught to do it in school. Everyone does the same essay, and if you want the A so help you if you try and take a stab at doing something different.
Anyway, the only place I could find with more than a minute of source material was from a website associated from some nutjob religious fundamentalist who thinks that the liberals are going to cause the apocalypse, which linked what appears to be the full speech. So hey, credit where it’s due.
I listened to most of the celebrity speaker’s sermon to grab some context along the way. It doesn’t deserve a thorough analysis. It’s a crap speech. It’s rambling, needs a lot of polish, and it sounds like it was composed by someone who never asked a theological question past 3rd grade Sunday School (he does not have any formal theological training, as a note). It was boilerplate American fundamental evangelical Christianity: everyone’s a sinner and you need Jesus and if you say the magic words you won’t go to Hell! That’s the context I got from it. Other people might get something different from it, but we’ll apparently never know, because to reiterate, none of the links of this I found had an analysis of anything beyond the quote about the atheists being murdered.
I would actually be totally content with just dismissing the guy’s arguments entirely. They’re hackneyed, and he’s no theologian. Ergo, no reason to pay attention to him. The concern I think we should have is, “why is this hack getting this kind of attention?” And not just in the media, but at the prayer breakfast. Why are Christians okay with getting a sermon from a guy with pretty simplistic and callow theological acumen just because he’s famous for his media presence? Why should atheists give a shit what he says? If you’re going to bitch at someone for having bad theology, maybe pick someone who’s at least skimmed Aquinas. I mean I’ll concede that there’s the argument that one should be concerned because his overly simplistic and ignorant statements are popular, but at the same time, they’re popular mostly /because he’s already popular/. We’re only talking about the guy because the guy is being talked about. Break the cycle, maybe?
But in the interest of entertaining some theological discussion, I want to address the point the guy was probably /trying/ to make with his atheist-murder comments. For starters, he was not implying that he wants to see atheists brutalized and murdered. That’s a bullshit analysis, and the headlines suggesting anything like it are bullshit too. I.e. all this sensationalism is bullshit. I’ll grant that it was kind of unsettling, but that doesn’t justify the headlines by a long-shot. This is basically just a mildly disturbing variation on the appeal for the existence of objective morality. An extremely common theological tenet is that there is an objective morality, and it is dictated by God. So logically, if there is definitely an objective morality, this is evidence of God. As a brief aside I will say there is a tendency for theists not to appreciate that atheism and the belief in an objective morality are mutually-exclusive. Ayn Rand’s annoyingly named “Objectivist” philosophy is an easy example, which is both atheistic and insistent that there is an objective morality. A minor quibble, perhaps, considering that in general, atheism seems to suggest tacitly that there is no objective morality (unless perhaps otherwise noted, we could say).
The appeal for the existence of objective morality is basically constructed by taking an example of an obviously heinous event and holding it up as an example that everyone, no matter their cultural (etc.) background, would agree is morally wrong. The example held up is subject to change, but it’s usually something that’s seemingly devoid of moral ambiguity. The torture and murder of innocents works pretty well for this. “American liberal neopagans and godless commies from the old Soviet Union and animistic heathen tribesmen from the remotest nooks of the globe would all be in agreement that slaughtering the innocents is bad, right? Right!” If something can be universally agreed upon, this is evidence of morality being objective, not subjective. So if there are things that can be agreed upon universally, there is objective morality. That’s basically the argument, and that appears to be what the guy was more-or-less going for. The creepiness factor didn’t help, and that fact that the comment was a bit rambly and disconnected probably didn’t help his case, but it’s not exactly out of left field theologically. I’m not saying you have to agree with the point, just realize that the point itself is not totally insane.
The thing to understand about his assessment of atheists is that he believes there is an objective morality, and that atheists do not accept this, and so by extension, he makes an ignorant and logically poor deduction that atheists therefore do not accept any moral code. So in his mind, atheists act as if they don’t accept the idea of right and wrong. He finds this moral ambivalence to be absurd, and he uses the graphic example that he chose to argue that even atheists who reject the idea of right and wrong, if demonstrated something so blatantly evil (wrong) would have some sort of inkling that maybe there is an (objective) wrong. I.e. deep down, if you pressed them hard enough, atheists do believe in objective morality, they’re just in denial on a day to day basis. The point of this in the larger context of his sermon is that everyone is a sinner and they need Jesus, and that a world that doesn’t recognize this is bad. His use of a graphic example is there to show an epitome of moral wrongness, not to demonstrate how he feels atheists should be treated, as so many people seem to be implying or presuming.