Poster from an American Humanist Association ad campaign in Washington DC.
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5 responses to “Not Good News”
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Poster from an American Humanist Association ad campaign in Washington DC.
Similar stuff out here in the northwest…a friend was visiting us in Portland from Eugene where she said these signs – http://www.kirotv.com/news/18172046/detail.html were everywhere next to Christmas displays. That link is from Olympia, WA where the sign is in their state capitol – the text was the same as the sign our friend reported. They’re created by the Freedom from Religion Foundation whose central location is in Madison, Wisconsin and whose apparent central occupation is the promotion of “freethought” and keeping church and state separate.
I have a lot of feelings about both of these posters, as I’m sure others do. It would be awesome to hear from some atheists. I appreciate the promotion of “freethought” in the First Amendment sense. Though, to paraphrase Bacon, in depth of freethinking would actually lead to agnosticism at the very least. It seems backwards to think freely up to a certain point and then just stop where that sign stops. Even in their pronouncement of Nature I feel the weight of the ancient mysteries and the so-called Animism of tribal peoples…but that is because I believe in God and I tend to think God is a fact.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) the ideal “be good for goodness sake” is yet another law no one can live up to. Instead of a divinely inspired law handed down from a mountain, Moses is replaced by “goodness.”
Who/what defines goodness? Society? Nature? The individual? Either way, the demand is ultimately too much for one to bear. Christianity (or some derivative) is the only system of thought that can speak to the discrepancy between “the good” and what I actually do and enable me to do “the good” in love.
I hope it was understood that by “not good news” I meant not the Gospel and not good news for people who are suffering. I didn’t mean that I want to squelch free speech. Quite the opposite…
You’re promoting people to speak freely!
RJ,
You are right! There is nothing good about what that poster says. Todd is so right to ask what/who decides what is good? It is actually cruel to demand ambiguous goodness. But they keep it ambiguous so that they can define what good is. Complete relativism. I think I am paraphrasing Nietzsche; I am not sure, but here it goes anyway: when you take relativism to its end it means that one can decide that killing someone else is good for them, and they are justified in doing so by their own definition of good. The person being killed may not agree that it is good, but there is no outside standard to which they can appeal. This is where good for goodness sake falls apart.
The truth is that they are implicitly appealing to God’s Law whether they like it or not. When I have talked with some self-described atheists they have answered these types of questions by saying “everyone knows that murder is wrong”. I coudn’t help but agree because the Law is written on their hearts. But, I digress.