Three kinds of Rights and Atheists

Interesting and not just because I'm agnostic. [Link]

This leads me to the central reason that I think that modern atheists have an incoherent world view. (And, before anyone raises objections, this isn't to say that I think that atheists are bad people, bad citizens, behave less morally than theists, or anything else: it's merely a statement that the ethical construct is incoherent and lacking in rigor.)

The reason for arguing that modern western atheism is incoherent is not that it is irrational to disbelieve in God; I think that one can be entirely sane and rational and disbelieve in God (although I actually think that agnostics have beliefs that are much more consistent with pure rationality than either theists or atheists, but that's a side note).

No, the reason that modern atheists have incoherent views is that they simultaneously

1. assert that there is nothing beyond that which is visible (i.e. they are materialists)
2. they believe in rights, and not merely in a legal or social descriptive way, but in an absolute and prescriptive way.

Let me explain what I mean by point number 2.

The English language muddies many discussions of "rights" because it uses one term to cover three very distinct meanings.

The three meanings are:

1. the "rights" that society acknowledges a person has
2. the "rights" that government acknowledges a person has
3. the "rights" that a person actually has according to non-material abstract principles

I assert that almost everyone in the modern West, including "Brights" / "new atheists" / Ayn Rand followers / etc. acknowledges these three distinct things and acknowledges them as distinct. And it's that final one, the acknowledgement of non-material abstract principles, that puts the contradiction in modern atheism.

Before I go further, though, let's expand a bit on what these three things are and bring up some examples of how all of us treat them as distinct.

Let's start with an easy example:

• location / observer: Jim Crow south
• right: right of blacks to attend school as equals
• social acknowledgement: false
• gov acknowledgement: false
• modern view on abstract right: true

By this I mean that in the pre-Brown v Board of Ed era in Kansas, blacks did not have the right to attend school as equals according to either the social milieu in Kansas or according to the government in Kansas.

…and yet almost every modern atheist would choose to describe this not merely in flat factual terms, but in terms of "injustice".

What is an injustice? It is a violation of justice, which is itself a term with two meanings: the actual black-letter law, and also abstract principles of ethical behavior. Clearly anyone who calls legal racial discrimination in 1950 an injustice can not mean the former, because they have already acknowledged that it was legal – so they mean the latter, that there is some ethical principle that is being violated.