The Limits of Secular Moralizing: A Response to Zuckerman
Some questions are so ill posed that there is some merit in working out why, as questions, they fall limply to the floor. One of these is the ‘who is smarter and more moral than who atheists or Christians’ question. One of the things I have spent a good deal of my life observing is people. I have observed many types of people from many backgrounds and I have come to one clear conclusion about them. People, as Jim Morrison said, are strange. They are puzzling and contradictory both in their capacity for goodness and their capacity for mischief and harm. I have also noticed that the good qualities in people can sometimes be difficult to untangle from the bad. As a result of all this I look on human foibles with a broadly tolerant eye and certainly have no interest in separating the sheep from the goats beyond what is strictly necessary to maintain basic standards of civilization. Nonetheless there is a certain species of moralizer who cannot leave the question there....