You know the XKCD cartoon that has a guy typing furiously away on his keyboard while his wife is saying "Come to bed." He replies "I can't. Something is wrong with the Internet."
Well, something is wrong with the Internet. If we're going to throw around words like agnostic, atheist, altruism, and morality, we need to talk about what those words mean. And I have to talk about it before I get ready for work, apparently.
First of all, an agnostic is somebody who's decided that they cannot know if there or is not a deity. They eschew major religions, because like Benjamin Franklin, they think that none of them are adequate. Literally in Greek, a gnostic is somebody who lacks knowledge.
An atheist has decided that there is no deity. The two positions are quite different. Atheists think there's nothing out there, agnostics think there is but we don't know what it is. Literally, lacks deity. I used to call myself an agnostic, because I thought maybe there was something out there. As I've gotten older, I've realized that I don't actually believe there's anything out there, other than the wonderful universe. I find it hard to understand why some people don't think that's enough.
All right, morality. Morality is a set of behaviors dictated by our societal structure and codified by the rule of law. We don't follow the morality of the Bible. Why do we then insist that morality comes from religion?
This is why people don't understand what the American Atheist billboards are all about. They're trying to show people that the morality of the Bible is archaic and full of eccentricities, like the owning of slaves or wives. I think the AAs would have much better luck getting their message across if they stopped trying to discredit the use of a historical document. Modern Christians don't use the Bible to support their version of Christianity. Christians in general vary in how much they read and analyze the Bible. Evangelicals are especially bad about actually looking at the Bible. Your average Christian believer is not going to be a Bible scholar. My dad thinks that because he's a Bible scholar, I became an atheist - because I was exposed to too much 'analysis' of the Bible. Phew! How do I go about deconstructing that statement? While it is true that many people who enter the seminary become agnostics or atheists, it's not because they learned too much about the Bible. If a religion can't stand up to a scrutiny of its so-named founding document, then there's something wrong with the religion. There are many people who came out with the opposite result - a stronger faith, rather than a lack of faith. People who lose their belief because they decided to learn more about Christianity built their house on sand, to throw around one of those Biblical metaphors.
Okay, altruism. Altruism at its roots is about helping others. All mammalian species do this. As we learn more about our evolutionary tree and the first mammal, you can look at all mammals in general and get a basic set of characteristics. We help others to get food if they can't reach it. We make friends with other mammals. We get horny. We mourn our dead. As a species, one of our strengths is that we help each other survive. There's a lot of people alive right now because of somebody else's actions. Even if it's just removing that board from the road. You can't tell me that that mouse that moved the barrier so the other mouse could also have a treat is a Christian mouse.
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