Or maybe I read it in a Cesar Milan book, the only one I’ve read is Cesar’s Way but I’m pretty sure I read it in the first.

Atheists Ashpenaz always acts like he has knowledge that Christians atheists, agnostics, deists, and Christians different from him, don’t know about.

Fixed it.

I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think Dostoyevsky was a bit better at grasping the complexity of faith or lack thereof than Ayn Rand.

Agreed. Rand could, at times, be every bit as unfair to religionists as you are to her. But now we’re goalpost-shifting again; we weren’t talking about the ability to grasp faith earlier, rather, we were talking about whether or not it is true that an absence of religious faith (in a form you would recognize and approve) necessarily dictates immorality. Dostoevsky got that one wrong.

Wolf packs have been known to collectively overthrow an Alpha if that Alpha is cruel and vicious…

That is super interesting and thank you for sharing it. I must point out that, as you suggest, the wolves would be acting on an inbred instinct. Instinct is not quite the same as having or needing a moral code, that is, a code of values upon which the individual reflects, and then applies in decision-making.

Rather than respond to the shallow, happy atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et. al., I take my understanding of godlessness from Nietzche, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, et. al. I am going to go out on a limb here, but I think Dostoyevsky was a bit better at grasping the complexity of faith or lack thereof than Ayn Rand. I like atheists who live with a noble despair than those who want to pretend there is some meaning to it all.

Sure they can, the society you live in can exile you or even execute you. This happens with hunter-gatherers and even animals. If you are a distruptive influence your neighbors will want you gone, not because of any god they believe in, but for purely selfish reasons.

Wolf packs have been known to collectively overthrow an Alpha if that Alpha is cruel and vicious. They kick it out or kill it if it won’t leave. If it breaks their ethical code (to lead with assertiveness and strength, not cruelty) it is punished. Wolves have no god, but they enforce ethics. It’s a looser and smaller set of ethics than we have, but they have them. And it’s purely based on practicality, but that practicality came about through genetic programming. Wolf packs that were not inclined to eliminate the vicious and cruel (sociopathic?) wolves did not reproduce as successfully as those that did, for obvious reasons.

In the same way, sure, you can do whatever you want, but to not expect consequences is silly.

I believed as you did many years ago, but I studied. I began through the study of christian apologetics and from there history, archaeology, anthropology, which lead me to study evolution, animal behavior and evolutionary psychology. You just have to start learning and stop speaking from a position of ignorance. You cannot argue against ideas you do not understand. If you want to engage athiests, you need to learn what they believe.

I had a music ministry, spoke in tongues, felt the spirit, tried to save souls, did it all, until my 30s. I felt god’s presence and knew he was real. But my studies of apologetics and biblical history and arguments against those eventually led me to believe there is no god, which was a period of years, maybe it took a decade of study. So I guess I’m the second person you know who did not become an athiest to have all the sex I want. Dan Barker, who wrote “Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists”. If you want to understand people different than you, go ahead and read that book.

That is called “begging the question”

There is no evidence that evolution has produced moral beings.

…other than the giant fact that it has produced human beings, the only moral beings, the only beings on this planet to have any need of morality and any ability to grasp it. Yeah, that doesn’t count.

If I don’t want someone’s genes to survive, and I kill them, there is no one to stop me.

That would be Nietzschean morality, which Objectivism rejects. It’s typical of you in my experience, though, that you can’t conceive of *any* other alternative to your version of morality.

You can show me whatever basis you want for an atheist morality, but if I choose not to obey it, there is nothing you can do to me.

What an absurd statement. If (note IF) it’s objectively valid morality, then it can and should rightly be encoded in criminal law.

That’s what Nietzche meant by the Superman–the man who has gone beyond mere human morality to create his own arbitrary morality and impose it on the world. He knew that was the only possibility once God was dead.

Tennessee Williams explored this in terms of sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire. What a man wants is his, regardless of the pain it causes.

Woody Allen explored this in Match Point. There is no God, so there is no justice–only luck. If I am lucky enough to get away with murder, I don’t have to feel any guilt or suffer any consequences.

You can show me whatever basis you want for an atheist morality, but if I choose not to obey it, there is nothing you can do to me. Hence–atheism means you can have sex with whoever you want without fear of consequences here or hereafter.

Rand nowhere suggests, anywhere, that there are absolute moral laws beyond man’s own selfishness

The more so, because morality is meaningless apart from humankind. Morality is not relevant to the lives of dogs or bacteria, for example. Or to rocks. As I said, humans have a unique need for morality as a guide to making choices.

Perhaps your point is that it’s not morality unless the human is submitting himself to something outside himself – for example, unless the human is restraining his whims and animal urges. Well, yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying all along. In Islam, you submit to God (supposedly). In Rand’s system, you submit to reality. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” The rights (a moral term) of others must be respected. Etc.

Thus, Ash’s intrinsicism – his emphasis on intrinsic, revealed morality as the only possible morality – is functionally little different from subjectivism. I.e., morality is functionally whatever Ash and the other guys in his Bible group -think- (or truly -feel-) God’s revelation had said it was. After they’ve consulted papal and ELCA documents, of course

Rand nowhere suggests, anywhere, that there are absolute moral laws beyond man’s own selfishness

First, her morality was based on principles not rules. If you’re looking for a rulebook, that would explain a thing or two.

Second, leaving aside the question of whether Rand’s morality was correct in all particulars, let’s note that she based it on analysis of what she understood to be objective reality. And she held objective reality, and reason which is used to discern it, as absolutes.

In present and past discussions, you have evidenced a belief in a kind of dualism between two approaches morality as the only possible approaches: what Rand would call the intrinsic (revealed by God, not necessarily having logic behind it except that God allegedly wants it); and what Rand would call the subjective (people rationalizing their whims). Rand built up a third approach, as contrasted against both of those: that *morality is an objective requirement* of human survival and flourishing, and the whole point of ethics as a science is to aid people in making good choices – choices that will make them healthier, happier and more human.

Interestingly, St. Paul hinted at such an approach in Romans 1:18-20. Slagging the pagans, he said:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Obviously, Paul is no atheist and no Objectivist, and is offering the pagans as an example of failure – all that is a given. What the above suggests, however, is that morality, to the extent that it is true, SHOULD be plain human beings by studying God’s creation, i.e., by studying reality; lack of Judeo-Christian revelations from God is no excuse for immorality. Rand would be sympathetic to the suggested method – i.e., to deriving morality by studying reality.

Now, whether you like it or not Ash, all of the above means that there are *there are other reasons than believing in God to be moral*. But, you don’t want to hear it, so keep on refusing to understand it. If you refuse to understand it, then it will never be true or possible and you will win the argument.