Doug Giles's column this weekend is the usual in-your-face, belligerent Christendom/Christendumber rap, this time directed towards atheists.

I assume that even many Christians can see what's wrong with his logic. In case it's not obvious to some, I'll see if I can offer a friendly parry or two to his unfriendly thrust.

He has a great title, I think: Hey, Atheists . . . get your own moral code. It neatly summarizes his point.

The problem I have, however, with the atheists and their goodness and their morality claims is that all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions. As a matter of fact, it seems as if you have bellied up to the Bible and are treating it like a buffet . . . passing up on the worship of the person and work of God, while taking second helpings of His moral principles, you duplicitous, little, evolved monkey, you.

Aside from the pronoun trouble here (and let's not call too much attention to it; we all fail in grammar sometimes, don't we?), the main charge is that modern atheists, when they attempt to behave morally, pick out the secularizable commandments and such, leaving the obvious religious ones. And then they pretend they . . . well, what's wrong with that, before I go on? Let me consult Giles:

If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn't exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored — I sure as heck wouldn't be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life's glide path.

Ah, there it is. He believes that the value of a maxim (or rule, or idea) derives from its source, not from its utility. That is, the maxim Do not kill innocent people (containing a definition of murder, or wrongful killing, and a modification of the vague Thou shalt not kill prohibition) gets its value, Giles implies, from those who adopted it before me, not from the fact (and this is pretty close to a fact, not a mere conjecture) that a society that did not promote the maxim and live by it as much as possible would be one that reduces to conflict and chaos too easily, which would be good, perhaps, only for those not only very good at, but positively enjoying, the act of killing innocent people.

My point is that it doesn't matter to me at all who formulated a maxim. Or supported it.

Take vegetarianism, for example. I'm not a vegetarian. But I might be talked into it. How would I decide whether vegetarianism would be better than an omnivorous diet? Well, it wouldn't be by investigating the biographies of past vegetarians and comparing them to carnivores. Hitler, after all, was a vegetarian. Would that dissuade me? Should it? No. Only numbskulls decide things for that kind of reason.

To decide on a diet, I might study medical research. I might consult my conscience about killing furry and unfurry animals. There are a lot of things I could consider. But putting Hitler on one side and Jerry Falwell on the other isn't going to decide this issue. (Even if, at present, I side with Jerry Falwell for other reasons than his late omnivorousness.)

It's no surprise that Giles brings up Nietzsche:

Nietzsche came to the conclusion that if there is no God — or God is dead, as he put it — then he's not going to live as if God is alive and His moral principles mattered. Yes, brass-balled Friedrich said that the opposite of how the Bible says to live is the way we should live.

Well, not across the board. Nietzsche may have urged a transvaluation of all values, and regarded the slave morality of allegedly altruistic Judeo-Christian ethics as perverse and anti-life and all that, but it's just simply not the case that he chose the opposite on principle.

He picked and chose, according to his values, according to the way he thought the world worked.

But Nietzsche is an apt strawman for Giles. For Nietzsche also believed that value comes from its source, and not from its use, or utility. Lester H. Hunt marshaled the evidence for Nietzsche's position on this expertly, leaving little room for doubt.

And this was a great error. For value has its origin in the usefulness of the object for a subject, in a context of competing objects and competing subjects for those objects. Economists are right; Nietzsche wrong.

So, an economist will not blush if he finds that one maxim he favors came from the acolytes of Ashtaroth, will not be the least ashamed to learn that Zoroastrians supported another of his prize precepts. These things are not important. It does not matter where a valuable things come from, to determine its value. It depends on use and context. The history of an object or a maxim may be very interesting. And it may affect the characteristics, of course. But those characteristics are what's important. Not the alleged unitary source for it.

This is so basic, all should see it. But I guess theologians and proselytizers for religion are so weak in their faith that they have to load their morality with ammo most apt to go off in their face. When you go for the big explosions, which make the biggest noise, you take your chances.

Further, of course, Giles shows himself to be unaware of the antinomies and ironies of his position. Many, many Judeo-Christian ethical positions were earlier advocated by Atenists, Zoroastrians and even worshipers of Ishtar. Does the argument then apply against them?

Of course, as a matter of history, our civilization does come, in part, from Hebraic sources. So of course the flavor of a contemporary atheists' values are going to have more than a tinge from that Hebraic past.

But Hellenism is also a source for our civilization, and it was a polytheistic world-view that morphed into some vague (and not so vague) theisms and atheisms of a philosophical bent. Does the morality of today's atheistic humanists look more like the morality of a Hellenistic Athenian or a Judean Essene? The question almost answers itself: even modern Christians behave more like the Athenian than like the Essene . . . or the Pharisee, for that matter.

Going through the Ten Commandments, of course the first batch are going to be rejected by an atheist, or any modern humanist. But what of the rest, the ones following the Sabbath injunctions? Let's consider:

1. Honor thy father and thy mother . . . Well, this is an honor-culture injunction, and this one encompasses quite a lot of values and virtues in it, values and virtues that most modern preachers wouldn't even know are hidden in it. Still, I bet most humanists would agree that, modernized a bit, the principle here is good, though the content of the honor system has understandably changed since the days of herdsmen at the edge of a desert.




2. Thou shalt not kill . . . This means, surely, Kill no innocent human beings in your social world. The proscription of murder is indeed an important part of any good ethic, eh? So of course humanists and atheists would adopt it and promote it.




3. Thou shalt not commit adultery . . . Well, breaking contracts is a bad idea, and its double bad when the contract is the basis of a family. But the idea that every marriage has the same contract is long past. Further, the sexual immortality notions in the Judeo-Christian history are nothing like the sexual morality notions now dominant . . . even among Christians. Premarital sexual activity is now not merely assumed, it's even encouraged by those of a humanist mind set. Why? For a number of reasons. Good reasons.




4. Thou shalt not steal . . . Most everybody knows that theft must not be encouraged. A view of the social world that really took the prohibition seriously, though, might be radically different than the one most Christians and most atheists now support.



5. em>Thou shalt not bear false witness against the neighbor . . . The most important of the Ten Commandments for the working of law. No rational person approves of lying as a way of life. honesty is key. It is good policy. More important, though, is not to lie on grave matters concerning other citizens. The legal system depends on rare instances of false witness. There's no reason to go back to an ancient text to see why.



6. Thou shalt not covet . . . This rule has fallen a bit by the wayside, in modern times. Its meaning in our culture is no longer clear. But its meaning, though, is not clear to Christians as well as humanists. And this lack of clarity has nothing to do with its origin in something a man named Moses allegedly wrote into stone. The murkiness is a result of the very different cultures of today compared to hard-scrabble living yesterday.

Humanists of today pick and choose from the ethical ideas of all the past and present. They are bound to no one notion, source, or context. They are free, so to speak. They are not limited by any ancient text. If a humanist finds one notion from Plato, another dozen from Aristotle, and a few good pointers from Epicurus, he's not doing anything unexpected or shameful or inconsistent. And if some of those resemble the principles that Jesus preached, that's no skin off anyone's nose.

It's not a matter of consistency to origins:

So what's it going to be, my obstreperous amigos? Are you going to continue to blather on about there being no God and then live like there is one and that His word and will matters? Get consistent, why don't 'cha? Don't live by the Ten Commandments. Don't live by the Golden Rule. Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's our stuff. That's the Judeo-Christian way. Get your own commandments that are logically deduced from the no God hypothesis, write your own unholy book and form your own civilization. Then let's see how appealing it is, how it betters the planet and how far you'll get.

Principles should be consistent. Indeed, one might inquire of a belligerent Christian like Giles whether he really thinks he's living by the Golden Rule when he argues in this manner.

More importantly, humanists should ask the guiled Gileses what makes them pretend to a monopoly on near-universal notions, like opposing murder, theft, and fraud.

And, besides, Giles . . . humanists already revised their morality, and set up a civilization. This one. The Enlightenment changed a lot, and led to the formation of the United States of America, with very secular roots. The Ten Commandments was not recognized in that document of law, nor was a deity even mentioned. And a staple of religious rulership from time immemorial, the idea of religious tests to hold public office, was expressly forbidden.

So, Mr. Giles, how do you like living in the world that humanists have helped recreate?

It really bothers you, doesn't it?

But do you have to bear false witness against the founders of modern civilization, in rants like yours?