Too lazy (and stupid) to be evil
One of the advantages of being an atheist, as we all know, is having no conscience and no moral bounds. If I want to stomp on a puppy on the way home from burning down an orphanage, who cares? Nothing matters anyway, right? And sure I enjoy stealing the pension fund of little old ladies as much as the next heathen, but honestly I'm not sure I have what it takes.
The problem is that anyone can do *one* seriously evil act and the prisons are full of these people (well, sure they are almost exclusively Christians and Muslims, but there has got be at least one atheist). But what's the point of being evil once? Having no conscience is way too good to waste on one event. You've got to make it last, work towards big goals.
As I was working at the food bank this week I really felt it was time to re-examine where I'd gone wrong with my life. Of course I was merely there to give the illusion of goodness, to provide cover for my future campaign of nefarious deeds. But who am I kidding? Being evil, seriously evil, takes work and brains. I guess I'm finally ready to admit I don't have enough of either to follow through with even the simplest evil scheme.
Lets take stealing a million dollars. I barely even know how to begin to plan something like that. Even knowing how much suffering I could cause and the orgies I could throw isn't enough to motivate me to even start acquiring the firearms and learning how to read building plans and alarm schematics. And heaven forfend that I should plan sloppily and have to live in hiding for the rest of my life. I tell you it's a lot easier to just show up at work each day. Honestly, I'm "just phoning it in" with respect to my lack of morals lately. What kind of example I am setting for my kids?
Such a waste of atheism.
[atheism]
posted by evtujo @ 2:33 PM
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3 Comments:
So you're saying an ethical atheist is an oxymoron? :)
How about the following situations - how lazy do you have to be?
1) You see an old lady you know that just got money to do a life saving emergency surgery getting into a cab and leaving. You see she dropped US$10000. You only have to get it and nobody will know. You are completely alone. What do you do?
2) You are in a conference in a foreign country. You don't know anybody there. You meet a beautiful committed woman who is willing to do anything you want but does not want anything else after that (you don't even exchange your names). Yes, you have a bag of condoms. What do you do?
3) You see a child running towards a car with a drunk man on the wheel. If you do not do anything, the kid will certainly die. You could easily stop the child, but then you would lose your bus that is about to leave, and another one is not due till the next day. What would you do?
And, finally, WWJD? :) (hey, do not be a weasel and sidetrack your answer!)
First of all I have no ethical duty to answer honestly to anonymous people so take this all with a grain of salt.
I can answer all these with the perhaps surprising reply: I would do what the Bible tells/implies I should do in each of these cases. I'm not saying the Bible has any privileged information describing how we should act it's just that some of the better proscriptions for behavior match pretty well with our hard wired moral reflexes. It's actually genius propaganda to say that we are inherently evil and then say that if you follow the Bible you will be good, since most people behave pretty well by default. (By the way, if we are inherently evil then why would any one ever care about becoming good via Jebus?). So Christians act about the same morally as anyone else indepedantly of what the Bible says.
So what it comes down to for me is I don't really have a choice to act ethically. I'm too lazy to deal with bad conscience.
In other words, you feel guilty. I knew it! Was that so hard to let it out? :)
PS.: You know who I am!
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