Reason Rally Review

As some of you are aware, I attended the Reason Rally yesterday in Washington DC.  My goal was to observe the event, and talk with some of the attendees about why I think Christianity is far more reasonable than atheism, secular humanism and other non-theistic worldviews.   I talked to a good amount of people, most of them very willing to discuss the issues.   For the most part, the attendees I met were quite cordial, which is what I was expecting.   What was surprising was the content of the speakers.   Logic, reason, and just overall manners were in short supply.   The speakers were generally pretty weak from a rhetorical perspective, not to mention their arguments were all extremely shallow.  Standard fare for the run of the mill, popular atheist thinkers.

The typical straw men that you usually hear atheists argue against were knocked around like piñatas.  “Christians are flat earthers!  Christians don’t let their kids get medical attention!  Christians are responsible for the atheistic Hitler killing the Jews!”   I guess that kind of thing is a lot easier than say, debating a real scholar like William Lane Craig eh Dawkins?   But again, all this went down exactly as I expected.

There were a few things that surprised me.

First, the people I spoke with all have an irrational, illogical and almost religious blind faith in the ability of science to answer all of life’s questions.   In one conversation, we eventually got to questions about objective morality.  The man I spoke with agreed with me and said that objective morality does exist.   I asked him,

“So how could morality be objective, without a transcendent moral law, something outside of ourselves,  in which to ground it.”

He folded his arms and grinned as he assured me, “We don’t know right now, but don’t worry, science will figure it out.  We’ll know one day.”

Talk about blind faith.  This statement is illogical and impossible.  It’s like saying, “Don’t worry, one day I’ll learn to smell with my eyes.”  It’s a nonsense statement.  Science will NEVER be able to give you morality.    It is not a scientific question.   Science tells you how things work.   It will never tell you if you if a certain act is moral or not.   Consider this disgusting yet truthful admission from Reason Rally headliner himself, Richard Dawkins:
“….there was a well-known television chef who did a stunt recently by cooking human placenta and serving it up as a pate, fried with shallots, garlic, lime juice and everything. Everybody said it was delicious. The father had 17 helpings. A scientist can point out, as I have done, that this is actually an act of cannibalism. Worse, since cloning is such a live issue at the moment, because the placenta is a true genetic clone of the baby, the father was actually eating his own baby’s clone. Science can’t tell you if it’s right or wrong to eat your own baby’s clone, but it can tell you that’s what you’re doing. Then you can decide for yourself whether you think it’s right or wrong.”

Classy Dawkins, classy.  But at least he is being consistent.  Science cannot and will not ever be able to show you the moral content of anything.

It baffled me that atheist after atheist was paraded out on stage, with no basis to ground the existence of morality, and proceeded to tell me all the things that I “ought” to do and, How I “should” treat people.  ...Huh?

There was one lady in particular, Greta Christina.  Her entire speech was all the reasons she was angry as an atheist.   This list included all the typical complaints:  “I am angry because of 911, I am angry because Catholic priests have molested children, I am angry because women in Arab countries live in bondage.”

I wanted to say, “Lady, I am right there with you. That stuff makes me angry too!  But as an atheist what right do you have to be angry about it?  Isn’t it just your opinion versus theirs?  Further, how do you know you’re right?”   I asked someone in the crowd about this, her response was:

“I don’t need a book to tell me that I shouldn’t hurt a child.”

Bingo!  I agree 100%.  Everyone, including atheists, knows right from wrong.  Just because they deny they were created in the image of a moral God, doesn’t do anything to change the fact that they were.   The moral law has been hard-wired into our brains.   What is the atheist explanation for this?

I actually heard atheists on stage saying that we should live by the code:  “Treat others, as you want to be treated.”    This statement was followed by raucous applause as if it was some amazing insight that only atheists truly understand.    I am all about this morality, but let’s get real here…..these are the words straight out of Jesus’ mouth.  They weren’t even rewritten for effect.   Yes, JESUS CHRIST was quoted and promoted at the “largest gathering of seculars” in the history of the world.

A major theme at the Reason Rally involved promoting Christian morality while disparaging Christianity itself.   This is non-reason at its very best. 

One of the stated goals of the Reason Rally was to change the way people view atheists in America. Honestly, I truly did come away from the Reason Rally with a new viewpoint on atheism.   Atheism, at its core, is a religion.   Just another in a long line of false religion. The only unique thing about this religion is that there is no god to worship…instead they worship a system of study, namely, science.  False religions all inevitably have one or more of the following hallmarks:   They are either (1) unlivable in a consistent way (2) historically untenable (3) intellectually dishonest or (4) inherently based on blind faith.   Atheism is all of these.   To be an atheist, you must consciously ignore much about the human experience, for example, the existence of good or evil in the world.   Either that or you must live inconsistently, for example, acknowledging good and evil for what it is, yet not acknowledging any way to objectively distinguish between the two.

One goal of the Reason Rally, that I heard when I went there but was not stated on the website, is that they want to eradicate religion, including Christianity.  Fortunately, with as weak an alternative as they have offered, we don’t really have much a reason to worry any time soon.