Some years ago I posted an excerpt from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan Karamazov brings his indictment against God to his brother Alyosha. In it he describes a number of atrocities based on real life stories. (Warning: Not for the faint of heart):
People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.
I asked our materialist friends whether it is self-evidently true that torturing young children for fun is morally evil in all places at all times even if everyone believes otherwise for whatever reason. I got a lot of hand waving and attempts to change the subject. I did not get any unequivocal answers from our materialist interlocutors.
Let’s try again. I say two things: (1) Torturing young children for fun is self-evidently morally evil; and (2) this is true at all times and in all places and in all cultures and under all circumstances even if everyone in a particular place and time were to disagree with me.
I challenge materialists everywhere. Come onto this website and start your answer with the following:
Response to proposition one: True or False
Response to proposition two: True or False
Then defend your position.
All attempts to evade the question or change the subject (such as bringing up specious discussions of obscure Old Testament texts) will be ruthlessly deleted, so don’t waste our time trying to put them in the combox.
Do you have the courage to face the questions head on? In my experience, some materialists do but most do not. We’ll see.
UPDATE: This post has been up three days now. Only two materialists have had the courage to answer the questions. There have been several attempts to obfuscate, confuse and change the subject, all of which, as promised, have been ruthlessly deleted. Come on materialists. You’re letting your side down. Have the courage to come in here and defend your views.