I was having an interesting exchange on a friend’s Facebook wall with a silver-tongued ‘intellectual’ religious apologist (the kind of predators I warn the impressionable young about, because they find them easy pickings and the younglings are overawed by their semantic callisthenics so much so as to be driven speechless, which they mistake as argument-less, and thus cede the point, in short giving these ‘intellectual giants’ the pleasure of stealing candy from a kid, literally) who claims that empathy does not come from within but only from God and His law. I shall not tell you which religion this person is from, since that will bias you. But rest assured that he insists that without an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God, humans wouldn’t know right from wrong.
I asked him a simple question: ‘Without your holy book, would you know murdering children is right or wrong?’ and his answer was ‘Of course, it is wrong, and my holy book says that.’ So, I pointed out a specific incident described in his holy book that pertained to God Himself asking a believer to murder a child, his (the believer’s) own, in fact, and the believer consenting to do so. And then, I asked him if he’d do the same.
I didn’t wait to hear the answer. I do not want to.
