I’d like to address a Christian argument that I’ve heard many times, You’ll know it, it’s not new. It’s a certain way of framing the moral argument for god. And it's particularly interesting to me in that unbeknownst to the person using it, it actually refutes itself in a unique way. Yep. I’ll show you what I mean.
Now in order to accurately present and discuss what I'm talking about here I'm going to quote verbatim from a Christian podcast without telling you who I’m quoting because I think that it’ll be familiar enough that you’ll recognise it as something many people have said so choosing just one person to pin this on isn’t what I want to do but for the sake of accuracy I will quote directly.
Forgive the speaker the stop-start nature of the prose, he was on the radio at the time:
“What do you think about that example,... the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Does our moral revulsion at those concentration camps, ... Is that because there is an objectively real fact about the matter?, that treating people that way is wrong,...?
Say Hitler had won the war, and we now lived in a society where because of that and the propaganda, everyone believed that anti-semitism was good, and gassing Jews was fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept?
Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong? Even though nobody thought it was wrong? Would it actually still be wrong, because we can be wrong about moral facts?
And if that’s the case, does that suggest that there is a moral dimension that isn’t part of our natural world, that somehow transcends it? Could this be the evidence for god...?"
Now to the speaker’s credit, it’s worded as a series of questions, but since we’ve all heard this worded less ‘rhetorically’ and more as a series of facts and conclusions, I’m going to take the liberty of interpreting the quote as an argument for the Christian god as the answer. OK, it was on a Christian podcast. So that’s where I’m coming from, because as I say, I’ve heard exactly this kind of “What if Hitler had won” as a very strongly argued case for what amounts to Christian theism from many people.
The Hitler thing is so interesting. It asks you to imagine our society, due to certain circumstances, excusing or agreeing with the holocaust! Imagine anyone doing it? In our real world obviously they'd pretty much be an extremist and certainly an outcast! What kind of crazy awful dystopian world would this be if we all thought that way?
Well, let’s investigate the hypothetical scenario in a little more detail.
The first thing to picture is that in that world, we wouldn’t condemn Hitler for having done what he did. That’s a basic part of the analogy, I know, but it’s worth stating again as a starting point. This is a world in which anyone who condemned or criticised Hitler and the holocaust would be the social outcast or lunatic fringe or extremist. Hitler would be admired by many in the same way as America might revere Lincoln, or the British might remember Churchill. Even prominent and respected people, would look back and admire Hitler for having carried out the holocaust. Try to imagine hearing Hitler being praised as a hero of the 20th C by someone that you admire.
I’d say that not everyone would be an enthusiastic fan of Hitler; the extent of the killing might still be off-putting to some, but the illustration does ask us to imagine that even the lily-livered bleeding-heart leftie liberals of the world would at the very least have an acceptance of the holocaust having been carried out- it would have their support as having been the right thing to do at the time, even if they wouldn’t want such a thing to happen again. Remember that a view of Hitler any more critical that that would put people over the line of being considered an extremist at odds with the prevailing moral sense of this imagined society, every bit as much as the opposite is true in the real world.
So everyone would think that the holocaust had been right and at the very least necessary, and justified. That would be the nature of the propaganda that the speaker mentioned, which would most likely be based around an argument that the Jews had deserved their genocide. The facts backing that up might be a bit tenuous, but the narrative would be something along the lines of how back in the early 20th century, things had gotten so bad, or were about to take such a serious turn for the worse, that drastic violent action against Jews had become appropriate, and murdering them all had become, at the very least, a necessary course of action, and that Hitler had done the right thing in following through on it.
I understand the point that the speaker is making, because to me this does feel like a less moral world. Whatever meaning you give to that word. It just seems wrong: our whole society celebrating or even excusing the holocaust simply because Hitler had won does seem to violate something very basic and even primal. It does seem that we would be wrong to accept the morality of the Nazi party just because they’d won. And as the speaker suggested, does that indicate that there are incontrovertible moral facts? In condemning the holocaust as we do in the real world, are we drawing on an objective morality that is never subject to human opinion?, or is our moral aversion to the holocaust something that we came up with ourselves, and perhaps partially because Hitler did in fact lose? But it seems deeper than something that we’d just kind of invent, doesn’t it? Where does that morality have its foundation? Outside of humanity,… Maybe. In a god?
Well, I’ve said before in previous videos that I’m happy to go there, I'm open to being convinced but as yet I'm not conclusively convinced, and despite the thought that's gone into these questions across the centuries and recently, as much as I’d like an answer I’m resigned to sitting in the I don’t know camp on the issue of objective morality. But this illustration and the questions it raises throws up some things that I do know.
This dystopian world we were looking at as a hypothetical,… As remarkable and discomforting as it is, doesn’t it look strangely familiar? Do we not actually live in such a world now? A world of people looking back into history and making excuses for massive genocides? Justifying the murders by arguing that they were necessary, and rather than condemning the people who carried them out, instead looking back to them with admiration, & reflecting that the peoples who were wiped out had actually deserved it?
It should be very familiar: These are exactly the kind of responses that Christian apologists give when confronted with the barbaric Old Testament genocides carried out on their God’s orders, and with its help and in its name.
Yes, they’ll tell you: genocide and mass murder are bad. Absolutely objectively immoral. That’s how come we know that the holocaust was immoral. It’s just that in, say, the case of the armies of the Israelites going through the promised land killing every single man, woman and child they possibly could as they invaded city after city, genocide was actually morally justified, and necessary. The people who were killed did actually deserve it, so it was OK to totally destroy them. It was the right thing to do at the time. The military leaders who carried out those invasions were actually heroic, people to be remembered and admired, not condemned. So much so that you could even read your kid bed-time stories and sing them little songs about the heroism of these particular genocidal mass murderers. There’s nothing immoral in what they did, see, these genocides have to be viewed in the correct context to be properly understood morally, and if you see a moral problem with any aspect of them then that can only mean that you’re looking at them OUT of context.
You’ve heard this all before, haven’t you? Faithful believers excuse the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of deaths carried out by violent extremist Israelite military leaders as having been uniquely justified and necessary, the right thing to do at the time, perfectly morally permissable. But hold on a second; In the hypothetical Hitler analogy, aren't we asked to imagine a society that excuses millions of deaths as having been justified and necessary, and to ponder what a messed up idea of morality it would take for a society to do that?
The hypothetical Hitler analogy mentions the power of propaganda, and asks whether military victory and propaganda could be all that’d be necessary to twist people’s thinking towards having them agree that genocide was moral? Well, apparently the answer to that question is yes: yes, they are. Just ask a billion or so Christians, and they'll tell you what they’ve had drilled into them repeatedly: that invading city after city and utterly destroying everything in them that breathed was the right thing to do, and was completely justified. They’ll go along with this explanation and yet look with horror and disdain at a hypothetical society that, without a firm foundation for its morality, could have its morality swayed by mere propaganda towards… what? excusing genocide.
Christianity: you are, and always have been, that group that’s been brainwashed by propaganda into excusing barbaric acts of war & violence. You don’t see it, do you? You ask us to imagine a culture that excuses and justifies appalling injustice, cruelty, and violence, without realising that you are describing yourselves. You paint a startling picture of a population that's had its morality hijacked by the victory and propaganda of a sadistic mass murderer. You ARE a population that has had its morality hijacked by the victory and propaganda of a long list of sadistic mass murderers, men who were simply the Hitlers of their own day, just with a different ideology and less effective weaponry!.
Allow me to replace just a few words of the example to demonstrate where Judeo-Christianity fits into this:
"Say the Israelites had won the promised-land wars, and we now lived in a society where because of that and the propaganda, everyone believed that destroying all those cities in Canaan had been good, and that “utterly destroying everything that breathed” had been fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept?
Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would the invasion and conquering of the “promised land” still be wrong? Even though nobody thought it was wrong?
Does our moral revulsion at those blood-baths, ... Is that because there is an objectively real fact about the matter?, that treating people that way is wrong,...?"
I’m calling bullshit on this. Having Christian apologists imply that not basing morality firmly in theism, as they do, could lead to a terrible moral degeneration into an unrecognisable world of moral chaos, in which EVEN genocide could be excused and tolerated. Gee, apologists, imagine that!
I’m also calling bullshit even more emphatically on something that I guarantee is going through the minds of none too few believers who are listening to this right now, and the very thing that will no doubt dominate the discussion in the comments even though I’ll knock it on the head here: it's what happens whenever a non-theist implies that the murderous violence and brutality of the Old Testament are quote “immoral”,
The theist will demand that we name the standard by which we’re judging the morality of the Bible. The implication is that as non-theists, we can’t, because we apparently don’t have one because we disbelieve in the only possible thing that could qualify as one - therefore our morality must be this flimsy subjective cultural negotiable thing that shifts all over the place at the whim of society, so we lose and we have to stop making any kind of ethical or moral judgment on the contents of scripture because our moral judgments have a poor foundation or no foundation.
Well, if you argue that way, let me tell you this very clearly, once and for all: Whatever basis a non-believer has for calling out the acts of the Old Testament genocidal warlords as appalling, barbaric and immoral, it’s automatically a better and more reliable standard than the one you’re using to justify them: because yours is entirely circular. You’re using the bible, and the morality inherent in the bible, to judge the morality of the bible.
Using the God that ordered genocide as the standard by which you judge the morality of genocide is exactly like somebody in that hypothetical example justifying Hitler’s actions by saying that they were OK on Hitler’s moral standard. Would you accept that logic? Of course you wouldn’t! The whole point of the illustration was to point out how BAD a basis for morality that kind of thing is! And it’s all you’ve got! The bible is the ONLY thing that you could really turn to to justify those genocides, though, isn’t it?, because the bible presents a morality that justifies genocide! Not much else in civilised society does any more, does it!
Bringing up Hitler’s attempt at genocide, or those of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot does not play out in the favour of a Christian view of objective morality against an atheistic view. You worship a god that you claim ordered and encouraged kings and military leaders to do things that Hitler and those guys, in a way, simply perfected. Moses, David, Gideon, and Joshua all gave it a pretty good shot, wouldn’t you think? And perhaps you ought to admit to yourselves that if they were recorded in scripture as having killed as many people as Hitler managed to- you wouldn't all of a sudden decide that they were evil mass murderers, you'd admire them no less than you do now, and praise god for the mighty power He'd displayed in destroying His enemies so thoroughly.
Before you start lecturing the secular world about where we need to look to establish a basis for morality, why don’t you come up with one that isn’t fundamentally hypocritical and circular?
The illustration draws upon this innate sense of morality that we seem to have and gets us to think of where it comes from. If you’re a Christian believer, let me encourage you, in all sincerity, to just admit that your commitment to this book puts you at odds with your own inherent sense of morality. In this video we’ve mainly looked at genocide because that's what the quote brought up, but just have a quick look at some of the other disgusting inhumanity that fills the pages of this book that you've been taught to consider "holy": Give credit to that sense you have, deeply ingrained, that tells you that NO MATTER THE CONTEXT, hurling rocks at an adulterous young woman until she dies as a result of it, is nothing less than obscene barbaric cruelty. Then think about how you actually feel about burning people to death. Where does that deep inner conviction come from that tells you that that kind of thing is wrong? Was it placed there by God? The same God that explicitly ordered that people do these things to each other? Are you seriously going to argue that? One doesn't need to have a well-defined alternative explanation of a basis of morality to know that this one is an absolute failure. One simply needs to be honest with themselves.
I'll conclude by once again suggesting that we leave this insane, fundamentally confused book out of the 21st C discussion of morality and ethics. It’s part of the problem, not the solution, because as we can see, if there's a worldview that leads people to excuse and condone appallingly cruel behavior, it's not atheism. It’s theism.
Now in order to accurately present and discuss what I'm talking about here I'm going to quote verbatim from a Christian podcast without telling you who I’m quoting because I think that it’ll be familiar enough that you’ll recognise it as something many people have said so choosing just one person to pin this on isn’t what I want to do but for the sake of accuracy I will quote directly.
Forgive the speaker the stop-start nature of the prose, he was on the radio at the time:
“What do you think about that example,... the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Does our moral revulsion at those concentration camps, ... Is that because there is an objectively real fact about the matter?, that treating people that way is wrong,...?
Say Hitler had won the war, and we now lived in a society where because of that and the propaganda, everyone believed that anti-semitism was good, and gassing Jews was fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept?
Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong? Even though nobody thought it was wrong? Would it actually still be wrong, because we can be wrong about moral facts?
And if that’s the case, does that suggest that there is a moral dimension that isn’t part of our natural world, that somehow transcends it? Could this be the evidence for god...?"
Now to the speaker’s credit, it’s worded as a series of questions, but since we’ve all heard this worded less ‘rhetorically’ and more as a series of facts and conclusions, I’m going to take the liberty of interpreting the quote as an argument for the Christian god as the answer. OK, it was on a Christian podcast. So that’s where I’m coming from, because as I say, I’ve heard exactly this kind of “What if Hitler had won” as a very strongly argued case for what amounts to Christian theism from many people.
The Hitler thing is so interesting. It asks you to imagine our society, due to certain circumstances, excusing or agreeing with the holocaust! Imagine anyone doing it? In our real world obviously they'd pretty much be an extremist and certainly an outcast! What kind of crazy awful dystopian world would this be if we all thought that way?
Well, let’s investigate the hypothetical scenario in a little more detail.
The first thing to picture is that in that world, we wouldn’t condemn Hitler for having done what he did. That’s a basic part of the analogy, I know, but it’s worth stating again as a starting point. This is a world in which anyone who condemned or criticised Hitler and the holocaust would be the social outcast or lunatic fringe or extremist. Hitler would be admired by many in the same way as America might revere Lincoln, or the British might remember Churchill. Even prominent and respected people, would look back and admire Hitler for having carried out the holocaust. Try to imagine hearing Hitler being praised as a hero of the 20th C by someone that you admire.
I’d say that not everyone would be an enthusiastic fan of Hitler; the extent of the killing might still be off-putting to some, but the illustration does ask us to imagine that even the lily-livered bleeding-heart leftie liberals of the world would at the very least have an acceptance of the holocaust having been carried out- it would have their support as having been the right thing to do at the time, even if they wouldn’t want such a thing to happen again. Remember that a view of Hitler any more critical that that would put people over the line of being considered an extremist at odds with the prevailing moral sense of this imagined society, every bit as much as the opposite is true in the real world.
So everyone would think that the holocaust had been right and at the very least necessary, and justified. That would be the nature of the propaganda that the speaker mentioned, which would most likely be based around an argument that the Jews had deserved their genocide. The facts backing that up might be a bit tenuous, but the narrative would be something along the lines of how back in the early 20th century, things had gotten so bad, or were about to take such a serious turn for the worse, that drastic violent action against Jews had become appropriate, and murdering them all had become, at the very least, a necessary course of action, and that Hitler had done the right thing in following through on it.
I understand the point that the speaker is making, because to me this does feel like a less moral world. Whatever meaning you give to that word. It just seems wrong: our whole society celebrating or even excusing the holocaust simply because Hitler had won does seem to violate something very basic and even primal. It does seem that we would be wrong to accept the morality of the Nazi party just because they’d won. And as the speaker suggested, does that indicate that there are incontrovertible moral facts? In condemning the holocaust as we do in the real world, are we drawing on an objective morality that is never subject to human opinion?, or is our moral aversion to the holocaust something that we came up with ourselves, and perhaps partially because Hitler did in fact lose? But it seems deeper than something that we’d just kind of invent, doesn’t it? Where does that morality have its foundation? Outside of humanity,… Maybe. In a god?
Well, I’ve said before in previous videos that I’m happy to go there, I'm open to being convinced but as yet I'm not conclusively convinced, and despite the thought that's gone into these questions across the centuries and recently, as much as I’d like an answer I’m resigned to sitting in the I don’t know camp on the issue of objective morality. But this illustration and the questions it raises throws up some things that I do know.
This dystopian world we were looking at as a hypothetical,… As remarkable and discomforting as it is, doesn’t it look strangely familiar? Do we not actually live in such a world now? A world of people looking back into history and making excuses for massive genocides? Justifying the murders by arguing that they were necessary, and rather than condemning the people who carried them out, instead looking back to them with admiration, & reflecting that the peoples who were wiped out had actually deserved it?
It should be very familiar: These are exactly the kind of responses that Christian apologists give when confronted with the barbaric Old Testament genocides carried out on their God’s orders, and with its help and in its name.
Yes, they’ll tell you: genocide and mass murder are bad. Absolutely objectively immoral. That’s how come we know that the holocaust was immoral. It’s just that in, say, the case of the armies of the Israelites going through the promised land killing every single man, woman and child they possibly could as they invaded city after city, genocide was actually morally justified, and necessary. The people who were killed did actually deserve it, so it was OK to totally destroy them. It was the right thing to do at the time. The military leaders who carried out those invasions were actually heroic, people to be remembered and admired, not condemned. So much so that you could even read your kid bed-time stories and sing them little songs about the heroism of these particular genocidal mass murderers. There’s nothing immoral in what they did, see, these genocides have to be viewed in the correct context to be properly understood morally, and if you see a moral problem with any aspect of them then that can only mean that you’re looking at them OUT of context.
You’ve heard this all before, haven’t you? Faithful believers excuse the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of deaths carried out by violent extremist Israelite military leaders as having been uniquely justified and necessary, the right thing to do at the time, perfectly morally permissable. But hold on a second; In the hypothetical Hitler analogy, aren't we asked to imagine a society that excuses millions of deaths as having been justified and necessary, and to ponder what a messed up idea of morality it would take for a society to do that?
The hypothetical Hitler analogy mentions the power of propaganda, and asks whether military victory and propaganda could be all that’d be necessary to twist people’s thinking towards having them agree that genocide was moral? Well, apparently the answer to that question is yes: yes, they are. Just ask a billion or so Christians, and they'll tell you what they’ve had drilled into them repeatedly: that invading city after city and utterly destroying everything in them that breathed was the right thing to do, and was completely justified. They’ll go along with this explanation and yet look with horror and disdain at a hypothetical society that, without a firm foundation for its morality, could have its morality swayed by mere propaganda towards… what? excusing genocide.
Christianity: you are, and always have been, that group that’s been brainwashed by propaganda into excusing barbaric acts of war & violence. You don’t see it, do you? You ask us to imagine a culture that excuses and justifies appalling injustice, cruelty, and violence, without realising that you are describing yourselves. You paint a startling picture of a population that's had its morality hijacked by the victory and propaganda of a sadistic mass murderer. You ARE a population that has had its morality hijacked by the victory and propaganda of a long list of sadistic mass murderers, men who were simply the Hitlers of their own day, just with a different ideology and less effective weaponry!.
Allow me to replace just a few words of the example to demonstrate where Judeo-Christianity fits into this:
"Say the Israelites had won the promised-land wars, and we now lived in a society where because of that and the propaganda, everyone believed that destroying all those cities in Canaan had been good, and that “utterly destroying everything that breathed” had been fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept?
Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would the invasion and conquering of the “promised land” still be wrong? Even though nobody thought it was wrong?
Does our moral revulsion at those blood-baths, ... Is that because there is an objectively real fact about the matter?, that treating people that way is wrong,...?"
I’m calling bullshit on this. Having Christian apologists imply that not basing morality firmly in theism, as they do, could lead to a terrible moral degeneration into an unrecognisable world of moral chaos, in which EVEN genocide could be excused and tolerated. Gee, apologists, imagine that!
I’m also calling bullshit even more emphatically on something that I guarantee is going through the minds of none too few believers who are listening to this right now, and the very thing that will no doubt dominate the discussion in the comments even though I’ll knock it on the head here: it's what happens whenever a non-theist implies that the murderous violence and brutality of the Old Testament are quote “immoral”,
The theist will demand that we name the standard by which we’re judging the morality of the Bible. The implication is that as non-theists, we can’t, because we apparently don’t have one because we disbelieve in the only possible thing that could qualify as one - therefore our morality must be this flimsy subjective cultural negotiable thing that shifts all over the place at the whim of society, so we lose and we have to stop making any kind of ethical or moral judgment on the contents of scripture because our moral judgments have a poor foundation or no foundation.
Well, if you argue that way, let me tell you this very clearly, once and for all: Whatever basis a non-believer has for calling out the acts of the Old Testament genocidal warlords as appalling, barbaric and immoral, it’s automatically a better and more reliable standard than the one you’re using to justify them: because yours is entirely circular. You’re using the bible, and the morality inherent in the bible, to judge the morality of the bible.
Using the God that ordered genocide as the standard by which you judge the morality of genocide is exactly like somebody in that hypothetical example justifying Hitler’s actions by saying that they were OK on Hitler’s moral standard. Would you accept that logic? Of course you wouldn’t! The whole point of the illustration was to point out how BAD a basis for morality that kind of thing is! And it’s all you’ve got! The bible is the ONLY thing that you could really turn to to justify those genocides, though, isn’t it?, because the bible presents a morality that justifies genocide! Not much else in civilised society does any more, does it!
Bringing up Hitler’s attempt at genocide, or those of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot does not play out in the favour of a Christian view of objective morality against an atheistic view. You worship a god that you claim ordered and encouraged kings and military leaders to do things that Hitler and those guys, in a way, simply perfected. Moses, David, Gideon, and Joshua all gave it a pretty good shot, wouldn’t you think? And perhaps you ought to admit to yourselves that if they were recorded in scripture as having killed as many people as Hitler managed to- you wouldn't all of a sudden decide that they were evil mass murderers, you'd admire them no less than you do now, and praise god for the mighty power He'd displayed in destroying His enemies so thoroughly.
Before you start lecturing the secular world about where we need to look to establish a basis for morality, why don’t you come up with one that isn’t fundamentally hypocritical and circular?
The illustration draws upon this innate sense of morality that we seem to have and gets us to think of where it comes from. If you’re a Christian believer, let me encourage you, in all sincerity, to just admit that your commitment to this book puts you at odds with your own inherent sense of morality. In this video we’ve mainly looked at genocide because that's what the quote brought up, but just have a quick look at some of the other disgusting inhumanity that fills the pages of this book that you've been taught to consider "holy": Give credit to that sense you have, deeply ingrained, that tells you that NO MATTER THE CONTEXT, hurling rocks at an adulterous young woman until she dies as a result of it, is nothing less than obscene barbaric cruelty. Then think about how you actually feel about burning people to death. Where does that deep inner conviction come from that tells you that that kind of thing is wrong? Was it placed there by God? The same God that explicitly ordered that people do these things to each other? Are you seriously going to argue that? One doesn't need to have a well-defined alternative explanation of a basis of morality to know that this one is an absolute failure. One simply needs to be honest with themselves.
I'll conclude by once again suggesting that we leave this insane, fundamentally confused book out of the 21st C discussion of morality and ethics. It’s part of the problem, not the solution, because as we can see, if there's a worldview that leads people to excuse and condone appallingly cruel behavior, it's not atheism. It’s theism.