re: Beauty and the Beast thoughts and discussions

quote:

---

Without resorting to personal opinion and other subjective standards, please explain how you define "decent". This is the ultimate folly of atheism. As Dostoevsky famously pointed out, if there is no God then everything is permissible. After all, if right and wrong become a matter of personal and social opinions, nothing is ever objectively wrong.

---

Sam Harris wrote an entire book about this very premise and argues why there is an active objective morality written in human beings and that God is not needed for it. The book is titled "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values". It's a very good read and I recommend it highly.

Here's the synopsis:

quote:

---

Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people—from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the primary justification for religious faith.

In this highly controversial book, Sam Harris seeks to link morality to the rest of human knowledge. Defining morality in terms of human and animal well-being, Harris argues that science can do more than tell how we are; it can, in principle, tell us how we ought to be. In his view, moral relativism is simply false—and comes at an increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our “culture wars,” Harris delivers a game-changing book about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.

---