The Godless God of secular morality

[Bubba_Switzler]

I found this to be a fascinating confession of moral nihilism from secularist/atheist in the NYT:

A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist/

 

[meltzerboy]

I find it interesting that this individual has come to the realization that their definition of moral relativism is an oxymoron, an untenable position, a non-existent middle road between faith and nihilism. I also sense they are reluctantly and apprehensively considering choosing moral nihilism as the rational alternative to their former belief in moral relativism. At the crossroads, it appears they may, however unlikely, still go in the other direction, towards faith. A fascinating moral dilemma.

 

[StrawberryJam]

Rewards are a powerful agent for actions. Have you had a puppy?
Rewards are not IMHO justifyable reasons for belief.