While I agree with her that there is no personal God and we are left to our own devices in terms of establishing ethics and morality, I don't embrace her ruthless elitism, the same issue I have with Nietzsche. I believe our moral code is inherent to us as a result of living with other human beings and the necessities of that.
There's a crucial contradiction here: first you say that "we are left to our own devices in terms of establishing ethics and morality," but then you say that "our moral code is inherent to us." It can't be both. In fact, if there is no personal God, the former is true; if there IS a personal God, the latter is true (though morality's inherent nature, in that case, would be due to God, not to us). The root issue here, though, is that atheism (or even agnosticism or humanism) disallows an objective standard of morality and ethics, meaning that not only are each person's actions right in his own sight, regardless of what others think -- thus leading to much chaos and confusion -- but also that there's no fair way of determining who should be listened to, or whose morality should be given the most weight (or if it should be given any at all). Faithfulness to the one true God (one of Whose chief attributes, by the way, is His personal nature) and to His one standard is the solution.
It can be both. I don't know how the original statement was intended, but we have inherent values based on our evolutionary history. We share much of this with other animals. Nevertheless, our values can transcend our biology since natural does not necessarily mean ethical. In that sense, we are left to our own devices.
The objectivity of the ethics of an atheist is no different than objectivity of the ethics of a religious individual. Both are subjective and greatly informed by inherent traits that evolved in humans and even in other mammals.
This should be pretty clear by looking at the conflicting values of various religious groups, including the conflicting values of groups within a particular tradition. I don't think objective reality is full of contradictions and mutually exclusive propositions.
What humanism (atheism is a red herring since it isn't an ethical system -- it is an ontology) has going for it is its desire to be objective by considering our growing understanding of human nature and the realities of the universe. Religious ethics typically does not anchor itself it anything objective but instead is rooted on faulty cognitive processes and resistance to growing knowledge.
I suspect that there is more agreement on values among humanists than among god believers. Also, keep in mind that there are many religious humanists, evidence that there is a clear ethical meaning to the label 'humanist', while 'religious' still tells us nothing about someone's ethics.
Topic: Atlas Shrugged: Part I (The Movie) (Read 11160 times)