Leah Libresco engages Catholics and atheists in ‘better fights about religion’

[rug]

Sat, Jul 5, 2014, 00:01
Breda O'Brien

‘Having better fights about religion’ was the title of a talk given by blogger Leah Libresco and hosted by the Irish Catholic last Wednesday.

Her unusual qualities may be indicated by the fact that it was livestreamed by iCatholic.ie, but she was also extensively interviewed by Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland.

Leah was a well-known atheist blogger, or at least well-known enough that CNN covered her conversion to Catholicism. She grew up in a non-religious household on Long Island with college professor parents, in a “community [that] was so isolated from religion that, when we learned about the Reformation in [high school] . . . European history, one student raised his hand to ask if Lutherans still existed”.

In fact, it wasn’t until she joined Yale Union, the philosophical and political debating society, that she fully realised that all Christians were not fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists. When she started dating a Catholic, she made a playful deal – she would go to Mass with him every week if he went to ballroom dancing classes with her, and they would also exchange books that best represented their positions.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/leah-libresco-engages-catholics-and-atheists-in-better-fights-about-religion-1.1855909

[Jim__]

1. I disagree with the claim that an atheist can't have an objective morality.

... Her belief that there is such a thing as objective morality proved crucial. Just as she believes that mathematical rules exist before humans, and are discovered by them, she believes discovering what is right and wrong is more “archaeology than architecture”.

Both her atheist and Catholic friends told her that these views were incompatible with atheism, but her breakthrough moment came when she realised that for her, morality was not so much an abstract law, as something close to a person.

Ronald Dworkin was an atheist and he argued that there was an objective morality. If I recall his example in Justice for Hedgehogs correctly, it was that torturing a child is objectively wrong.

[rug]

2. Me too.

It looks like the distinction is that she was saying there was, not necessarily religious, and others on both sides said there can't.