kblog2standaloneAfter a several-month hiatus, Katherine Kersten’s lightning rod-conservatism is back at the Star Tribune, and her edgy, faith-tinged opinion hasn’t failed to disappoint those looking for controversy.

Her Sunday-only column this week took aim at atheism and what she perceives as its detrimental impact on society. She argues that without faith in God, people have no basis to form a moral framework. As a society we are embracing atheism, she writes, “[b]ut before we do, we would be wise to consider the potential consequences.”

Such as? Bloodshed. “The French Revolution, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union — all sought to replace Judeo-Christian ethics with reason, and ended in massive bloodletting,” she wrote. “In ancient Rome, disabled babies were left on hilltops to die.”

Her column sparked outcry from many atheists who say that faith in a Judeo-Christian God does not form the basis for people’s compassion, sense of equality, ethics and morals. People do.

Craig A. James, author of The Evolution of Religion, responded to Kersten’s column on his blog, The Religion Virus:

Her argument presupposes that God exists and gave us our morality, and presupposes that without God there will be no morality. But if you drop the presupposition, that is, assume God does not exist, then the Bible itself proves that Kersten is wrong! The Bible (and many other supposedly God-inspired writings) is full of all sorts of great moral lessons (and some terrible ones, too), and since these were written by men and women, not God, it proves that humans can be moral without divine guidance.

George Francis Kane, public relations officer for the Minnesota Atheists, said that equality is inherently a secular concept:

Atheists base their moral judgments on the actual effects of actions on peoples’ lives, rather than principles religion claims to know with certainty. The religious conception of equality that Kersten touts is equality before the god of the Bible, and is not realized until the afterlife. Equality before the law is a secular concept that could only arise when the legitimacy of government is based in the consent of the governed, rather than divine election. Atheists demonstrate compassion no less than that of Christians, but based upon quality of life rather than unbending absolutes.

PZ Myers, a Minnesota biology professor and recent winner of the Humanist of the Year Award, responded to Kersten on his blog Pharyngula:

I always like how these doctrinaire promoters of “Judeo-Christianity” primly declare that they have such moral authority, when their faith has such a poor track record of promoting morality. Christians have advocated slavery, have murdered people for the awful crime of miscegenation, have decreed that people who don’t have the kind of sex they prefer are second-class citizens. Christians are thieves, murderers, rapists, and jay-walkers; it seems that having a belief in a transcendent authority actually doesn’t equate to being necessarily law-abiding and ethical or even, shocking as that may be, immune from the temptations of their natures.