re: "Imaginary morality" (PostBag, March 19)
Dear editor,
I am not sure what letter of mine Eric Bahrt thinks he is replying to, but in "Killing in the name," I explicitly refer, among other well-known examples, to the religious ideologies called communism, fascism and Maoism. I might not have said the names "Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler," assuming, perhaps over confidently, that readers would connect the three murderous ideologies cited with the names famously associated with them.
Eric is also confused about what atheists say morality might be, falsely assuming it means nihilism. This is not true. Whatever might provide a foundation for healthy morals, it cannot be the word of non-existent gods arrogantly deeming themselves infallible, whether Zeus, Yahweh, Sekmet, Ares, Allah, Jesus, Kali or Santa Claus. It is equating morality with the words of their own god or gods that gives the religiously zealous an excuse to kill and commit other evil in the names of those gods whilst perversely calling their evil a campaign of good morals, exactly as communists and other other secular religions kill in the name of ideological purity to their unfounded beliefs about the world and morality.
Finally, the honest and moral answer to Eric's question about the force behind nature is that we do not know. Science is making slow and steady progress, but an honest admission of ignorance is a good thing: people do not kill in the name of what they admit not knowing. Fake claims of infallible omniscience are again the preserve of fanatical religious hubris that has not the moral honesty to admit both ignorance and error.
Any human institution of moral worth must be able to produce its long list of past errors and current litany of ignorance. To pretend otherwise is proof of dangerous dishonesty.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on March 20, 2019, under the title "Litany of ignorance" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1647764/litany-of-ignorance
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