![\"Iceland](\"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Iceland-Atheism.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMy, there are a lot of atheism memes being posted on Facebook at the moment! Here’s one a friend recently posted:<\/p>\n
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My first reaction to this meme is one of puzzlement. As is often the case with memes like this, it makes a straw man argument. Do theists really say that it’s impossible for atheists\u00a0to do good deeds? Do we really say that countries with an atheist majority will always be hell-on-earth? Personally, I’ve certainly never made that case!<\/p>\n
I’m not 100% certain, but I’d guess that the faulty idea behind this meme comes from a misunderstanding of the Moral Argument for God’s existence<\/a>. However, the Moral Argument does bring up an interesting question for the creator of this meme. Without an objective, external Moral Law<\/a>\u00a0(i.e. God)\u00a0who is to say what counts as “evil and depravity”<\/span><\/em>?<\/p>\n I do also query\u00a0some of the examples it gives at the top of the meme. Consider the first statement that “Iceland has no standing army”<\/span><\/em>. While it\u00a0is true that Iceland does not have a standing army, it still has\u00a0a Coast Guard and various Special Forces Units. Not only that, there there are agreements with NATO and the United States to protect Iceland in case of hostilities. Putting these omissions aside, however, is the meme really suggesting that the absence of an army flows from being an atheistic society<\/strong>? Is the meme saying that\u00a0armies are, in and of themselves<\/strong>, “evil and [depraved]”<\/span><\/em>? Is there never a good reason to go to war?<\/p>\n Another\u00a0point it makes is that “the economy is booming”<\/span><\/em>. Despite the fact that this is a rather rose-tinted view of the state of Icelandic economics<\/a>, what exactly is the argument being made here? Is it saying that weak economies<\/strong> are\u00a0“evil and [depraved]”<\/span><\/em>? Or is the meme crediting Iceland’s economy to atheism?<\/strong><\/p>\n The other thing this meme ignores is that Iceland is an extremely homogeneous population, and it’s well known that homogeneous populations will have reduced social ills because the population generally shares the same values.<\/p>\n