Atheists are immoral -- debunked

VenomFang> And if you believe that you came from a monkey, doesn't that give you permission to act like one, too?

Kent Hovind> You know, we've been teaching our kids that we nothing but an animal, and today a lot of men like animals. Barbara Reynolds figured it out; she is a liberal journalist. She said: "Your kids go ape in school? Here is why: he's been taught evolution."

In this video we are going to meet some of the nominees for the coveted Golden Crocoduck and debunk the first of many myths [???] they propagate. Never mind whether this argument about behaving like animals is supported by evidence; what exactly does it mean? Does behaving like animals mean we peacefully [???] to no longer engage in warfare? Does it mean we happily graze on grass all day instead of practicing intolerance and deliberately inflicting pain on our fellow humans? If this is supposed to be an insult or a dire warning, it's hard to find the downside. Let's move on to claims that try a bit harder to hit their mark.

From HBO's 'Friends of God'> Wherever [???] is believed, wherever it is taught, there is greed, chaos, revolution, and immorality. In the Bible, Romans chapter I warns us about the natural consequences of rejecting God the Creator. It results in man becoming involved in wickedness and moral corruption.

No wonder they don't want evolution taught in the classroom! But before we start banning books, let's see how this claim stands up to the evidence. The more accepting evolution and godless the country is, the more chaos, revolution, immorality, wickedness and corruption you'll find there, right? So the United States where only 10 say they have no religion and 7 to 13% accept natural selection would be much more peaceful and well-mannered than Britain, where 44% say they have no religion and only 7% say evolution is absolutely false. If you haven't got the stomach for seeing what happens with a secular country like Great Britain, look away now: I am about to show you what it's like there. A land of godless ??? [%screams%] Or my god! They are shopping... and eating lunch... sitting on the grass and ... talking. Well, maybe England hasn't gone crazy now that atheism has taken hold. If we go to countries that are even less god fearing like France and Japan we'll find them coping quite well too.

Let's start with a comparison of crime. Although crime rates in Britain and France have now caught up to the United States, in Japan rates of crime are nowhere near as bad. But surely, if most people accept evolution in these countries, the rates of crime should be far worse. As for sexual morality, that's a hard thing to qualify. Not everyone sees it in biblical terms. But let's look at teen pregnancy. According to ???, you would expect to find much higher rate of teen pregnancy in evolution accepting Britain than in god fearing America. But no! Pregnancy rates of the US are nearly twice as high as rates in Britain, four times as high as in France, and seven times as high as in Japan. In other words, the more atheist and evolution accepting a country is, the fewer teenage pregnancies result???.

What about divorce rates? Well, true, godless Britain has almost caught up with the United States, but counties like France and Japan still have much lower rates of divorce than the United States. If we look at the US alone, an interesting study was carried out in 2000 by the Christian ??? research group. The organizers were hoping to show that godless atheists get divorced far more often than morally superior Christians. But the pollsters were shocked to discover just the opposite. According to the survey, the divorce rates among members of nondenominational churches was 34%, baptists 29%, born-again Christians 27%, and atheists or agnostics 21%.

So it's clear from the evidence that a belief in evolution doesn't lead to chaos, revolution, immorality, and wickedness. This was summed up in a 2005 study in a journal of Religion and Society which looked at various statistics, surveys and polls and came to the following counter-intuitive conclusion: in general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

But if atheists don't get their moral compass by following instructions from holy books, where does it come from? The answer is, that a sense of decency and compassion seem to be universal. All over the world people have it, whether they believe in one god, lots of gods or no gods at all. It comes from a mixture of our intelligence, our upbringing and our genes. Remember how the knowledge that we are animals is supposed to corrupt us? It turns out that social animals like primates and elephants also have an innate sense of altruism and fairness, which like all our traits has evolved. Humans evolved as part of a group, a tribe. Tribes that were composed of people who cooperated, shared and helped each other would have had a much better chance of survival than tribes comprised of individuals who didn't cooperate and didn't share. The latter would have very quickly fallen apart in an orgy of selfishness, recriminations and infighting. In a cooperative tribe a selfish individual who didn't cooperate and didn't share would have been banished or ostracized. Cooperating with others and sharing with them ensured our survival. Generosity and fairness were also desirable traits in a mating partner, so the genes of these traits got passed on.

But these tribes also survived by defending their territory. Just as they showed fairness and generosity within the group, they showed hostility to other groups trying to invade their territory. Groups can cooperate to their mutual benefit. Again, this is part of the evolutionary process, because it ensures survival. So we have the capacity for both altruism and hostility within us, and this is manifested in the world regardless of our religious affiliations.

But something else has evolved alongside those traits - a larger brain and reasoning power. We have the capacity to quell our hostility, to suppress our prejudices, and to reason with people we fear. We learn to be tolerant of people different to us. And we pass on these beliefs to our children. It doesn't matter whether children are brought up in an atheist family, like mine. The side of human nature they lean to in life will be partly determined by who they are and partly by how they are brought up.

There is one final bit of mud to be slung at atheists. Golden Crocoduck nominee Ben Stein was happy to sling it in the movie "Expelled", and here it is repeated in a youtube video called "Evolution vs Creation #11".

Adolf Hitler used the Darwinian thesis of natural selection and survival of the fittest to weed out who he considered to be the inferior strand of humanity.

The Adolf Hitler argument goes something like this. Evolution proposes that the strong must triumph over the weak. So when strong people learn about evolution, they think it's ok to kill weak people. If that's true, then it's a good argument for teaching what the theory of evolution really says. But in nature the fittest individuals, not the strongest or the meanest, have a better chance of passing on their genes. As we've seen, in human societies the fittest can mean the most cooperative. Throughout history and for thousands of years before Darwin the strong have never needed an excuse for exploiting the weak. Christianity have certainly not been an impediment to this process. And in the modern day the idea that if you accept evolution you turn into a fascist is once again not born out by the evidence. In the United States, arguably the most free-willing economy in industrialized world there is no socialized medicine and few easy handouts. But in secular countries like Britain, France, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands there is for the most part a very generous welfare system and free medical care. These are clearly not systems that endorse the philosophy of strong overpowering the weak. They exemplify once again the complete opposite. And for those who make the case that an acceptance of evolution leads to left-wing totalitarianism - that doesn't stack up either.

So for fundamentalists who love to tell me they are morally superior because they have a purpose in life and something to believe in, I have a ready reply. I have my own beliefs and my own purpose in life. I've been happily married for twenty years and have lived my life decently and honestly without ever needing to consult a religious manual. When our children ask whether any gods exist, we tell them it's a matter of personal faith. But we do teach them that it's wrong to be dishonest, selfish, lazy and rude. We teach them to be honest, compassionate, hard-working and well-mannered. Our teenage kids are polite, doing well in school, and never get into trouble. And all this has been achieved without any need for James Dobson's solution of beating, smacking, spanking, and threats of hell. So tell me, what part of this is immoral and wicked.

You'll find my individual sense of right and wrong on a separate video on this channel. If other atheists share these values - and most of the ones I know certainly do - it may give an incline as to why this apocalyptic vision of an atheist's world is ignorant and prejudiced junk.