Amazing Atheist On How Atheists Are Better At Christmas

The Amazing Atheist posted a video giving three reasons why atheists are better at Christmas
Atheists don't have to go to church. Um...neither do Christians. Why are Christians obligated to go to church on Christmas? All Christians don't automatically subscribe uncritically to every pronouncement or stance of institutional Christianity.

According to the Amazing Atheist going to church also detracts from what Christmas is really about, which is family and togetherness etc etc. But how did this tradition really come about? How did it come about that Christmas is seen as being about family and togetherness? Through Christianity obviously.

"I don't want to destroy Christmas. I like Christmas. I just don't think it has anything to do with Jesus". TJ goes off about how atheists don't really want to destroy Christmas and goes on a pointless and absurd but admittedly funny rant about Bill O'Reilly and Fox news and then manages to take a stab at the Rapture as well. I think what I found most funny about it is how unbelievably tangential and irrelevant it was. Well, the issue is highlighted by the passage quoted from TJ above. If you're going to redefine Christmas as being a non-specific  non-religious celebration of "family", then you have destroyed Christmas. The family is redefined on atheism, and Christmas is also completely redefined on atheism. The central narrative around which Christmas is constructed and around which all the other pleasant things about Christmas developed is Christianity. Christmas is altered fundamentally without its origin and shaper ( Christianity).

"Atheists don't have to worry about the true meaning of Christmas". Well, they don't have to worry about the religious meaning of Christmas, but if TJ truly values Christmas, then he has to say that atheists do have to worry about the meaning that he believes to be the true meaning of Christmas. 

Sam Harris on Morality....Again

Sam Harris recently posted a blog post contending as he did in his book, The Moral Landscape, that "science is not value-free". There is truth in such a statement, but not in the sense that Harris would have it.

Harris still fails to answer the is-ought problem. How one can derive normative information from descriptive information. He compares our intuitions regarding physics to our intuitions about morality saying, "we also have an intuitive morality, and much of our intuitive morality may be wrong with respect to maximizing human flourishing". But if our moral knowledge can only come from intuitions, where does Harris get the idea that maximizing human flourishing should really be the prime moral ideal? We can only perceive this information through moral intuitions or revelation, or a combination of both. And we cannot know that our moral intuitions actually tell us something valid about the world but by appeal to God. 

His defense of it is to say that "well-being" encompasses everything we can care about "in the moral sphere". Since he is attempting to define the moral sphere itself, his reference to it here is circular.  The point of an objective morality is for its obligations to be independent on human desires and preferences. In other words, the justifications for holding a particular morality cannot be that "everyone cares about it". This would mean that the foundation of morality is no more than popularity and societal cohesion. This means Harris is arguing from popularity ( which is a logical fallacy).

Harris's landscape remains an implausible alternative to a religiously rooted morality.