Andrew, can I just say one thing? Great questions. The issues you raise are very important, and I’m glad to address them:
Well not all societys’ values lead to a society which wants mass murderers punished. …] Many Soviets truly loved Stalin the murderer and praised the Gulag.
Very true. There are indeed societies run by totalitarian regimes, societies where force is used on citizens, and/or societies where mass murder is carried out.
My values lead me to condemn those societies. I condemn them not on the grounds that these societies are somehow objectively “evil,” but because my values simply lead me to dislike them intensely. In normal conversation, “intensely dislike” doesn’t have a strong rhetorical ring to it, so I might call them “bad” or even “evil,” but what I mean is that these are societies that I personally don’t like. My dislike stems entirely from my subjective judgment, based on my personal values.
Luckily for me, the vast majority of people on the planet agree with me.
Let me be very clear here: My values lead me to condemn the values of Stalin. His values might lead him to condemn my values. Neither one of us has some objective, magical “correct” position.
But when push comes to shove, if I were ever to encounter someone in real life with values similar to Stalin’s and a willingness to act on them, I’m going to make sure that my values win. That’s that. I don’t need some magical backing behind my position to advance it.
So were the crimes of the atheistic Soviet Union, the killing of tens of millions of innocent children, men, women wrong?
No. “Right” and “wrong” have no objective meanings outside of a human point of view; those terms, the way you’re trying to use them, are just gobbledygook. The crimes of the Soviet Union were things that I personally find reprehensible. There is no cosmic meaning attached to those crimes – they are atrocities perpetuated by humans, and I approve of efforts by the human race to bring other events like that to a halt.
Even atheists who give to charity, like Bill Gates, who you pointed to seem peculiar.
Well, I certainly can’t judge his motives either. It’s surely possible that his altruism is, perhaps in part, a PR move – to what extent we’ll never really know – but I evaluate actions by consequences, not intent. From my perspective, it’s not terribly important
why a citizen chooses to help society, just that a citizen
does.
There are other atheist philanthropists, like Robert Wilson, who donated $22 million dollars (to Catholic schools, no less!). But I don’t particularly see what it proves to cite atheist philanthropists, other than to point out that there are both religious and non-religious people who are altruistic.
AntiT, what language would you use to condemn Soviet and Nazi crimes. Why can’t you say they were evil?
I’d say that they were horrible crimes against humanity that we need to study to make sure we don’t repeat them.
Let me be very clear again: just because there’s no objective morality doesn’t mean that we can’t judge things – we just do so on the basis of our values.
