RE: Toaster strudel alliance takes on drugs, atheists and liberalism
March 14, 2013 at 10:05 pm
(This post was last modified: March 14, 2013 at 10:07 pm by jstrodel.)
I think the notion of being responsible is very questionable. In a world in which atheism is true, what is the atheist thinker responsible to do? Responsible to provide for self and probably avoid breaking the law. But what is the responsibility atheists have? Noam Chomsky talks about the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and challenge power, how can intellectuals carry this out if they are atheists? It is like they feel they have this responsibility to challenge power, but they have no established authority of exactly how to do that. I think it is different for each intellectual. They all have their own ethics and epistemology, and each sort of does whatever they want, obeying the law when it agrees with their ethics, starting revolutions when their beliefs tell them violence is justified.