Mischief, hoop tricks, and spectacular moral failures

I’ll admit it: I find a certain mischievous (humanist) pleasure in pointing out the nonsense that permeates the Abrahamic religions. Faith (belief without evidence) is little more than an outrageous excuse for ignorance, and when peddled as something worthy of societal application it deserves all the mockery a mindful monkey can muster. As Jefferson outlined in a letter to Francis Van der Kemp belittling Christian doctrine (30^th July, 1816): “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.” I agree, and that brings me to one of the most implausible hoops a theist has to jump through to believe in an all bells-and-whistles Omni-everything deity: Objectivism; the fountainhead, an apologist will say, of all human morality. Now, ignoring the fact that empathy and a strong sense of fair play has been observed and tested in many of our mammalian cousins, cheerleaders for a sentient, thoughtful, wilful, invisible god profess that morality is issued by (and only by) said celestial being and that these laws are, as such, immutable. That is to say, to believe in a sentient, thoughtful, wilful, invisible god is to also believe in the rather ambitious notion of objective truth; a set of unmovable, precision tooled maxims which should (having been forged by most-excellent god) penetrate all tribal, domestic and international legal code and remain morally true in a timeless continuum. Self-evidently this is a ludicrous claim, swiftly debunked by our modern-day repulsion to biblically sanctioned slavery.

In a word, the idea of god-given objective truth is nothing but theological gibberish; a baseless philosophical meandering heard but never seen, forever threatening to walk on stage, but never arriving. The simple fact is not a single objective truth has ever been established in any human arena, and this has led rationally minded individuals to conclude there is nothing further to the morality question than levels of purely human (entirely terrestrial) subjectivism; abstract scores ranging from the seasonal truisms of street fashion to the almost-objective truth that something like plagiarism (moreso than even murder) is almost-always morally inexcusable. Said in another way, the bible is no more a source of objective moral guidance than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an industrial design manual for ornate Shāng Dynasty ritual wine vessels. Indeed, read the bible cover to cover and anyone curious enough to look will find just one single piece of practical moral advice inside all its sixty-six books; a lone precept approaching something resembling an objective truth: the Golden Rule. As a moral directive it’s certainly worthy of our praise and under normal operating conditions a memo all people should strive to practice. That being said, the so-named Golden Rule fails spectacularly to meet its own moral calling. The Golden Rule is plagiarised. The concept dates back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1650 BCE) “Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you.” It also emerged in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1780 BCE), as well as in 6^th century BCE Taoism, “Regard your neighbour’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbour’s loss as your own loss,”  in 5^th century BCE Confucianism, “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself,”  in 4^th century BCE Mohism, “For one would do for others as one would do for oneself,” and was articulated by the Greek, Pittacus (640–568 BCE), who said: “Do not do to your neighbour what you would take ill from him.”

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but pilfering another man’s idea and passing it off as your own (without credit or reference to the original source) is NOT exactly doing unto others what you would want them do unto you… and it’s certainly not the behaviour becoming of man-god/god-man.