Hey, it’s your family ex-Muslim. In this post, I will be responding to two Muslim women from TikTok on the topic of morality. 

Here is an excerpt of the transcript of their video:

Infidel Noodle: “Things are okay because you don’t have any objective morality and that is absolutely absurd.”

Ginrabah1996 and friend: “Okay, so we’re going to explain this one more time. As an atheist, you’re in no position to critique anyone else’s morality because it’s inherently contradictory. As you mentioned in your video you said that atheists are not a homogeneous group. So therefore your morality is subjective. As an atheist, you can’t use morality as an argument to disprove anybody else’s religion because according to you, your morality is subjective to you and our morality is subjective to us. And that’s exactly the point: your morality only applies to you and no one else. 

We’re not saying that atheists can’t be moral. All we’re saying is that you as an atheist cannot project your morals onto anyone else. Therefore you can’t use your morality to disprove someone else’s religion. So according to your standards, you might as well go delete your TikTok account because all of the morality arguments that you’ve made against Islam are completely invalid. This is the first and last time we’ll be responding to you because no Muslim takes you seriously. Your arguments are child’s play”

So when you say our morality is subjective and yours is objective couldn’t I just make my morality objective too by merely that it is objective? Making the claim that it is objective does not make it so and neither does claiming that your morality is from God. Anyone can claim that their morality is from God. I can claim my morality is from God too: “God whispered in my ear through a real fairy that my morality is the best and the only true objective morality. It has the true and perfect morality for all human beings. It’s an objective morality because you see it came from the true God.” Now I could say this and you’d laugh at me just like you say your morality is objective and I’d laugh at you Just saying your morality is objective does not make it objective.

We even have examples where things changed in the lifetime of Muhammad. According to your morality, is mutah (temporary marriage) moral or immoral? If it’s immoral, why did Muhammad allow it for a period of time? Did God change his mind? Did he go from allowing it (halal) to disallowing it(haram)? And there are other examples too. Having sex during the Ramadan period was haram until Allah revealed that it was too difficult for the believing men and women I guess. So that it’s now halal. In the beginning, alcohol was fine only to later be declared haram. Riba was fine before it became haram.

But certain things stayed halal for example slavery. It stayed halal until after Muhammad died. Muhammad benefited from the system of slavery by reaping profits from buying and selling slaves as well as sleeping with female slaves. In fact, the companions were horny and they wanted to sleep with their slaves (captives of war). They asked Muhammad if they could have sex with them and pull out so that the slaves do not end up pregnant

Essentially they wanted to enjoy sexual pleasure without then sell the slaves off after the iddah period (the waiting period) and Muhammad allowed them to proceed. According to your objective morality, there’s nothing wrong with that. Would you allow your sister, your daughter, your mother to be a slave? To be put in this awful situation where you know one of these warriors captures her and does what he wants with her and then sells her? This is all objective morality according to you.

But what is morality? Morality is how we behave to benefit the well-being of other conscious creatures. How we treat others is morality. If there were no conscious creatures there would be no morality and we don’t judge the morality of animals because animals don’t have the same level of self-rationalization as we do. They don’t have the ability to evaluate ethical decisions. They just eat. For example, a cougar will eat a rabbit and we don’t say that was immoral.

Animals do lots of things like that which we would cringe at as humans. We don’t do those things because we have morality. We can reason to make a better world and there is a fatal blow to all religious morality which is Euthyphro’s dilemma. Look it up.

Let me ask you a question. Are things good because they’re good or actions good because God said they’re good? Okay. If actions are good because God made them good then does that mean God can make bad things good? Can God actually rule that plucking out the eye of your firstborn son as an example of Sam Harris brings up? Can that be a moral thing to do because God made it moral? No, it’ll never be good because itself it makes the child suffer It’s harmful It takes away from the fulfillment of his life

So we all understand that the goals of morality or what should be the goals are to increase well-being for everyone, to make the world a better place, and to live in a way that our actions do no harm to others. And that’s what the moral sphere is. It’s that we don’t harm other people unless and of course, we have to in order to say protect ourselves or in order to prevent another injustice from being done. So it’s not like pacifism has problems too because if you just don’t do anything then, of course, evil people will you know bulldoze over the rights of the innocent. So when you say you cannot project your morality onto anyone else well what would we evaluate morality on?

If we go by what you’re saying well you can’t project your morality on us either. But isn’t that what Islam has tried to do? Isn’t that what Islam tries to do? Like to manifest itself over all others religions in ways of life despite what the disbelievers or the mushrikeen you know despite the disbelievers hating it. This is the goal of Islam. It says in the Quran that it’s to manifest itself. Muhammad used jihad to spread the religion all over. His dying wishes included fighting the Romans and kicking out Arab polytheists, Christians, and Jews from the Arabian peninsula. He said to Osama bin Zayd to go and fight the Romans. 

So you see that Islam is a nasty system that wants to put itself into our lives. It wants its morality to be on everyone else’s. Whereas morality should be something that everyone will have their own values and teachings but we cannot harm others by our morality by our values.

Islam takes away individual rights. In some ultra orthodoxy groups, they force people to grow beards and they forced hijab. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at how oppressed people are over there. Look at how life can be so miserable for a woman in Egypt that you know she gets a divorce the custody goes to the man. She doesn’t have inheritance rights like the male counterparts do.

The women in Egypt have been fighting for equal inheritance rights for a long time because Islam takes away their inheritance rights. So Islam is actually a bad system of morality, right. It is a system of morality but it’s a bad one 

What’s much better is humanism because it strives to optimize for human well-being. If we’re on the same page when we’re talking about human well-being, we can say that okay this is bad for morality forcing hijab you know it causes hair loss and it takes away from you know the full freedom of living and it takes away from a woman’s right to be herself to dress the way she wants to, right? If she wants to wear that’s a different story but to force it, to make it the law right, to mandate certain things like that. Everyone should have the right to choose for themselves stuff like that.

Islam, what it does is it looks at the needs of the group of Islam over the needs of the individual and this is where it falls apart. And you know, of course, it favors men. 

We can use morality to prove/disprove someone else’s religion because you are claiming your messenger/prophet was the best prophet to exist. You are setting him up as an example to be evaluated. You’re asking us to evaluate him as the best man. You can’t just say he was the best man according to his own values. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Could I say I’m the best man according to my own value? That’s nonsense.

So we have every right to evaluate because otherwise when you say that Muhammad was al-Amin the best man or the honest the truthful you know Sadiq al-Amin you’re saying that we should evaluate his behavior. You are giving us the opportunity to judge him because you are claiming that even the non-Muslims used to say that he was the best man.

So then what are we judging him on? On Islamic values? Come on. This is like such common sense that we all know that the non-Muslims were judging him on his behavior in that society.

According to what they understood to be good when he went and married his adopted son’s ex-wife they were all like “Whoa that’s weird. That’s strange. That’s nasty”, right? When he married a child no one blinked an eye because child marriage was normal back then, right? Marrying a child was like nothing wrong with marrying a child, which is why we don’t see people criticizing that part of Muhammad’s behavior until far after, right? Much much later when our values improve, when we considered marital rape a crime, when we consider child marriage a bad thing for very good scientific reasons. A girl’s hips are not wide enough for the baby to come out and she gets painful conditions. She can die. She can get a fistula. 

So our morality has evolved. We even treat animals now better than ever before. If you harm an animal you can be charged for that. We care about the well-being of all conscious creatures, right. And if somebody does something wrong like for example the U.S is bombing Afghanistan and let’s say that innocent people are dying well, that’s wrong. We can call that out and many people protested the Iraq war. I am not saying that America is perfect or something like that.

I mean the system of evaluation has to be independent of religious belief because religious belief is very subjective even though you claim to be objective. As I was saying about Euthyphro’s dilemma, God cannot make something good just because he says it’s good. We know something is good because it’s good  for the world

We know lying is wrong right and so is dishonesty because would you want to live in a world where people lie to you? No, you wouldn’t right. So go back to the golden rule. Go back to common sense. Go back to you know human thriving right. It’s not that difficult

You guys need to study secular morality. Remember, God cannot make something bad and immoral into something moral. Euthyphro’s dilemma study it, read it, memorize it. It is a very good counter to the theistic morality arguments.

Nobody’s saying that morality like hedonism or like self-gratification and what’s good for me is what’s moral. No! It might be okay for me to you know enjoy my life but not at the expense of someone else’s life, not hurt by hurting somebody else and that’s what we talked about in the moral sphere right.

We have to make it as big as possible so we don’t harm others. We don’t harm animals. We don’t harm nature and the environment. We want to have that sphere be as big as possible and not shrink it down to just ourselves. We only care about ourselves. We want to care about as many people as possible.

Again, I’m no expert on this, but these are just my simple thoughts and I hope you enjoyed it and hopefully learned something