Once Again, Believers Have it Wrong: Atheists Don't Just Want Sex, Drugs, and Lack of Morality

As much as religion's defenders would like us to believe otherwise, there is no non-human moral authority.

January 23, 2012

The death of Christopher Hitchens last month sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his seemingly effortless erudition, and his crusading defense of free speech and rationalism. 

Of course, he had his faults as well -- most notably his support for the Iraq war -- and I was happy to see that relatively few of the eulogies, even those written by his personal friends, overlooked or excused this. Given how averse Hitchens himself was to whitewashing the lives of the deceased, I have no doubt that this is how he would have wanted it.

There was one item, however, that caught my attention -- this column in the New York Times, which had the following line: 

Of course, he took on God, a dangerous occupation in the United States, declaring him not great and religion the product of a time when nobody "had the smallest idea what was going on." Like Einstein, he viewed ethics as "an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it," a position that sparked conflict with his journalist brother, Peter, who has argued that, "For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself." READ MORE