Amorality?

My attention was recently drawn to an article called A Plea to Atheists: Pedophilia Is Next On the Slippery Slope; Let Us Turn Back Before It Is Too Late. The article was written by Rabbi Moshe Averick. The article can be found here: article.

The article gets off to a terrible start by asserting "It is axiomatic that in the world of the atheist there is neither morality nor immorality, only amorality." It later says  "There is nothing that atheistic societies are incapable of rationalizing and accepting – including the sexual molestation of children." It later says "The atheistic notion that life emerged randomly from ancient Earth’s prebiotic slime, coupled with the Darwinian belief that humans are no more than intelligent chimpanzees, leaves us morally bereft."

I'm obviously an atheist. If I'm supposed to be ok with pedophilia, I mustn't have gotten the memo from Chimpanzee Atheist Headquarters.

The article goes on. The author lists a number of moral criteria that he believes that everyone should agree on to prevent this atheist pedophile rampage. The list combines ideals loosely based on the 10 commandments and the United States Declaration of Independence.

• All men are created in the image of God and are therefore inherently and intrinsically precious.
• All men have been endowed by God with unalienable rights and among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• Thou shalt not murder.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery, incest, or bestiality.
• Thou shalt not have sex with children, and if you do you will be looked upon as a disgusting and contemptible criminal and will be treated as such.
• Thou shall teach these laws to your children.

The irony lost on  the rabbi is that the God that he believes in doesn't seem to have the same moral indignation about the things that he does. For instance, he believes that God gives everyone the right to liberty. According to Exodus 21 and some other chapters in the Bible, God seems to be perfectly ok with slavery. Slaves do not possess liberty. He doesn't seem to think that people have the right to live because he kills people over and over again in the Old Testament. God didn't seem to feel too strongly about the right to live of the firstborn in Egypt or the inhabitants of the promised land not to mention everyone in the world except Noah and his family. If I was arguing against something written by a Christian instead of a rabbi, I'd point out that if God can send people to hell, it doesn't seem to agree with the idea of every life being precious.

The truth of the matter is that both he and I get our morals from the same places. We get them from society. We get them from our family and friends. We get them from our culture. We get them from philosophy.

More is learned about morality by asking questions than by asserting that we get it from a supernatural God. There are a number of ways in which the God in the Bible seems to disagree with our modern morality. Imagine if believers really got their morals from God. Disobedient children would be stoned to death in the streets. Human or animal sacrifices would be happening. There would be slavery. There is a very long list of biblical immoralities that I won't list here. Suffice to say that morality clearly does not come from this God.

Even the perpetrators of the holocaust felt justified by God in doing what they were doing.

This is the belt buckle that Nazi soldiers wore with their uniforms in World War 2. In German it states "God is with us" The worst immoralities are almost always religious in nature.

If you believe that a loving God exists and sat back and witnessed the holocaust and let it go on for so long without intervening and you think that this God is our moral example, then it is you Rabbi who is amoral. Not me.