I came across this delightful little web poll yesterday at work. My boss asked me to look up an email address for this radio station, so I go to the website in an attempt to find it, and instead, this pops up on my screen.News Radio Fox, as it turns out, is a conservative radio station in none other than southeast Texas. A big banner that is smack dab in the middle of the web page asks you to vote in this ridiculous survey. So I clicked on it, voted that yes, atheists can have morals, and found out that I was in the minority. By a lot. Kind of appalled, I googled morals, and found out that morals are an "ethical motive: motivation based on ideas of right and wrong" (from Princeton Wordnet) .
Can an atheist have morals. News Radio Fox is essentially asking the people of southwest Texas (and me) if people who do not believe in God can still have a concept of right and wrong. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the bible is the only source of ethical standards in America today.
I really just find the whole exercise depressing. And not just because they spelled "atheist" wrong. By suggesting that atheists cannot have morals, they are implying that atheists are not people. This is why Radical Middle Easterners want to kill us. When a society belittles a sub sect, the whole society is lessened.
1 comment:
The beautiful part about bias is that it blots out anything. Bias, or the very possibility of bias is enough to discredit anything. For instance, if I wanted to, I could challenge your definition of morality because it comes from an academic source, and academia is leftist (interestingly, academia is traditionally conservative, only in recent history has academia been labeled as liberal, or so says my American Studies Professor). So eventually argument will no longer exist because no one will accept a premise that even sounds unfavorable, so there will be nothing to argue about. It will have degenerate into insults back and forth. Oh well.
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