WELCOME!
To the 8th installment of Thursdays with Seth! This week, I, Seth Coster, Finance Director of UNIFI, will make a case against religious ethics, and I will of course cover a few other extremely important issues. Buckle your suspenders... your pants just might fly off.
HOLY SATAN VS. ZOMBIE JESUS!
I have been dabbling in a new online game called Champions Online, in which you create a custom superhero and play online with other people who have also created superheroes. You then travel around a big city or various wilderness areas and beat up criminals and such. I decided to model my superhero after Satan:
Notice the holy energy radiating off of his leathery, demonic flesh.
His powers include using holy energy to heal his allies, and he can also set people on fire and make them explode. You can also create a nemesis, so I made my nemesis as "Zombie Jesus." Zombie Jesus has started to pop up in the game, randomly robbing banks and museums and using his army of undead minions to rain destruction down upon innocent people. So naturally, as Holy Satan, I have been kicking the shit out of him.
JESUS CHRIST IS AN UNRULY WOMAN.
This week in Birmingham, Alabama, Jesus Christ was called to Jury Duty. It turned out to be a 59-year-old woman whose original name was Killingworth, but she had legally changed her name to Jesus Christ. She was very rambunctious and was dismissed from participating in the trial.
Read the full story here.
IT'S COLD.
I have the good fortune of having the first snow day of the season take place during my weekly blog post. So in light of this winter wonderland of snow, I have one thing to say: don't catch snowflakes on your tongue. They are tasteless and do not hydrate you as effectively as a real glass of water does. Also, they probably have swine flu. The snowflakes, I mean.
ETHICAL MELTDOWN!
Religious people always throw this stupid question out there: "How can atheists have morals or ethics when they have no solid foundation in which to ground them?" Well, I'm here today to spin that question on its head and turn it back around toward the religious side. Here is my question:
How can you have a solid ethical and moral foundation as a religious person?
Allow me to illustrate my reason for asking. As a nonreligious person, it is easy for me to assemble a code of ethical principles by which I live my life. Here are a few of them:
- Treat others as I would like to be treated: with equality, compassion, and fairness.
- Always rise to meet any challenge I face.
- Work hard and earn my rewards.
- Always act with honesty and integrity.
It's pretty straightforward. These are my ethical standards simply because I would prefer everyone else to have them, so it is only fair that I expect the same of myself. There is not a lot of gray area here. For instance, I am against slavery. I am for equal rights for everyone. It's cut-and-dried. Whenever I land in an ethically sticky situation, I have an unambiguous set of guidelines which I can follow.
Now, what if I was "saved" by accepting Christ as my lord and savior today? Suddenly, I have to add some stuff to my list. My revised list may now look like this:
- Treat others as I would like to be treated: with equality, compassion, and fairness.
- Always rise to meet any challenge I face.
- Work hard and earn my rewards.
- Always act with honesty and integrity.
- Obey the commandments of the Bible.
- Avoid sin and do not give in to temptation.
The most important thing to note here is that the commandments of the Bible come from a society that deemed them appropriate 2,000 years ago. This puts my two new ethical guidelines in direct conflict with some of my original four. For instance, the Bible commands that women be silent and obedient to their husbands. It also commands that women cannot hold positions of power over men. Suddenly I am in an ethical conundrum. I am all for equality, but the Bible demands that I treat half of the Earth's population like dirt. What do I do?
I have contradictory ethical statements, and now I have to prioritize them by order of importance. Well, is it more important for me to obey the Bible and get into heaven, or is it more important for me to treat others equally? I suddenly have no ethical compass to follow; it is pointing both North and South simultaneously.
I don't need to expand on this too much, but as you think about this dilemma, think about various people who very well consider themselves to be extremely pious but who many people consider to be evil snakes. They have no real direction; they are being pulled in two ways: either do the right thing, or get into heaven. You can't have both.
So I submit that as atheists, agnostics, or nonreligious people in general, we don't have to answer the unbelievably stupid question of why we don't live immoral or unethical lives. Instead, we should demand an answer from the religious side:
How can you possibly claim to be more ethical and moral than us, when you are forced to hold a set of conflicting ethical principles?
ATHEIST FINANCE: GNUCASH!
Most of us think that we do a pretty good job of managing our money. But guess what? We are lying to ourselves. Many of our estimates and predictions about our spending and income are completely inaccurate. One way to help manage your money is by monitoring your spending and income and setting up budgets that you can check against your actual spending and income on a monthly basis.
If this sounds like something you would like to do (which it should), you should check out GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org)! It's a very handy and simple accounting program that sets up your accounts for you and allows you to set up budgets and monitor your income and spending. It also collects all the data you put in and makes it into very convenient reports.
And best of all, it's open-source, which means that it's free.
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