Dec 20, 2009

“The world is my country, and to do good my religion”

According to an atheist club site I randomly came across while researching the (possibly) next article. I’ll stop talking about atheism so much soon, but I see some issues with the statement. First is one of grammar – I’ve always, in general, thought it a bit off somehow to place a comma in front of the conjunction “and”. This complaint was of course extremely petty, and to be honest Christians, and perhaps evangelicals especially, are rather poor at grammar (the extreme liberals like to avoid logic, so I guess we had to give something up to be fair), and other such stuff, judging by various books published by Christian publishing houses which I’ve read. Or maybe, like the atheists, they just can’t afford decent editors. I'm not even too sure about the "look ma, no, and" (I just made that up) rule - any suggestions?
What hit me first though, was the question of where precisely the normativity is coming from – what is it to “do good” and why bother? Specifically, what is “good”; is it perhaps just subjective? Of course, there are plenty of non-theistic ethicists who can at least attempt a cogent answer to this. I’m interested in the is/ought issue here. If any of these ethicists are reading, please give me a bell, or an email or a comment or something; as I think you ought to!
I’m not sure what the world being one’s country means really, but I think it’s some kind of reaction to North American (it might have been Canadian, so I dunno exactly) patrio-religionism. Maybe, on another note, only non-theists are allowed to believe in world government(?) – but why (leaving the government aside), stop at the world? It seems a bit narrow of this club (I am assuming that they intend to refer to earth); particularly if we live infact in a multi-verse.

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