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... I was just sitting here, mulling over this comment as I'm reviewing some of the various responses that have been made, and it came to my mind that, yes, perhaps an atheist may even look at me and think, "I, and Shermer, and even Christian Smith, are all a bit 'kinder' than this 2PhiloVoid chap ..." And I suppose I'd partially agree with him on that point. So, good point, Gaara! All consuming kindness is not my strong suit. I guess along with some of the other Existential philosophers, I have a bit of 'ressentiment' that needs to be addressed (notice, it's not 'resentment' with the usual English spelling, but that of the French ... used and referred to, however diffusely, by the likes of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, among others [see the brief link below].)...Moral differences between atheists and theists don't have to stem from moral ontology, though. It's entirely possible to make simple comparisons of two people's adherence to mutually-accepted maxims without them having to align perfectly in all other aspects of their moral framework. For example, can an atheist not say to a Christian "I think I'm more moral than you because I am a little kinder to everyone around me than you are?" This is the only kind of comparison I see atheists making when they call themselves more moral than Christians.
Ressentiment - Wikipedia
True, but then there will be Christians who argue that measuring God's morality purely on what we perceive is His expressed level of 'niceness' is rationally misdirected, such as can be seen in D. Stephen Long's (2004) essay, "God Is Not Nice." Long says something sociological in nature which I find interesting and which partly comports with the way I see the world,There are some atheists who will argue that Christians are actually more moral even than their God, which simply won't compute from a theistic framework, but when taken as the sort of comparison I just described, you start to see where they're coming from.
There are two sources of the nice god--one cultural and the other theological. The nice god emerges from the therapeutic culture of late modernity where self-esteem and narcissism rule. The nice god who seeks only my spiritual fulfillment without the judgement of the cross and the wounds of Christ fits well a therapeutic culture intent on making persons whole who have no easily definable disease in the first place ... (p. 45, in D. Brent Laytham, ed.)
Obviously, Long's first cited source above can prove to be a veritable lightning rod for heated debate, but as if that isn't enough, he goes on to briefly state his second source, and it too is a lightning rod, although one from another direction:
...But Christians might have resisted this god more powerfully if not for a fateful turn in theology around the time of the Reformation (the sixteenth century). That turn was the development of the idea that we cannot really know God, but can only know what God does "for us" or "in us." Together, these two historical changes transform God into a form of self-therapy for our perceived psychological needs. (p. 45, in D. Brent Laytham, ed.)
So, with that, I propose a toast to our mutually acknowledged 'ressentiment' ... not that I agree with everything Long is saying, but he makes some interesting points as to why we're all feeling the way we're feeling these days and, thereby, resorting to the moral decisions that we do and subscribing to the ethical frameworks that we do, in the human, all too human, ways that we also do.
REFERENCELaytham, D. Brent. God Is Not...: Religious, Nice,"One of Us," An American, A Capitalist. Brazos Press, 2004.
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