Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

What a bigoted statement! That sounds like a radical evangelical who knows nothing about the constitution. Well, the reality couldn't be farther from the truth. The speaker of this quote is none other than one of the fathers of this nation: John Adams. What would lead such an enlightened revolutionary to make such an anti-secular statement.

I am going to make a rather controversial argument. I contend that without religion the very basis of our nation would be irrelevant. For the purpose of argument let me assume an atheist paradigm*. Lets say for a minute that this world came to be due to statistical chance, and God did not exist. Can the United States exist? Can limited government exist in any form?

Let's play a game.

An atheist has to decide whether human beings are inherently evil, or inherently good. If humans were inherently good, then how could one explain the existence of evil? One could of course take the view that Rousseau held and assume that man made institutions directly lead to evil. Then you come across a bigger problem. If man made institutions lead to evil, then who created these institutions? These institutions obviously do not predate man so evil had to exist before then.

What most atheists end up conceding is that humans are inherently evil or at the very least selfish. If you find yourself in this group, you are in company with many of the prominent atheists of today's time such as Dawkins and Hawking. The problems arise later when you consider what this nation was founded on. Here is a quote you should be pretty familiar with:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

The Declaration of Independence

This country was founded on the very notion that men are endowed with certain unalienable rights. The key question that Atheists tend to ignore is, "Who endowed us with these rights?" An Atheist cannot concede the existence of a creator so must look elsewhere to justify the existence of these rights. The original writer of these words was John Locke who wrote of life liberty and property as unalienable rights. According to Locke, the reason these rights should be protected by governments is because they were given by God. So let's explore how atheists rationalize human rights.

Utilitarianism

One effort by atheists to justify humanitarianism is Utilitarianism. The principle of Utilitarianism states that given two decisions, one should take the decision that better benefits society in general. By such a principle human rights such as life liberty and property would be protected since it benefits the community as a whole. They would also cease to be protected if it does not benefit the community as a whole. Under this framework, speech would be protected but hate speech would not as maximum benefit would be attained by suppressing offensive speech.While this may seem like the perfect paradigm of atheist humanitarianism, it is inherently flawed in several regards.

Flaws of Atheist Utilitarianism

1. Why would an atheist value every person's happiness equally? Who is to say that me killing someone else will not increase my happiness at a greater magnitude then the decrease to the happiness of the other person. And since there is no after-life in the atheist paradigm, then who is to say that I am not doing him a favor if he is leading a miserable life? If someone ceases to exist, does there happiness go to zero? 
2. If you could save the lives of five people by killing one person, would you do it. The atheist utilitarian by definition believes that we should kill that one person to save five people. However such situations exists in this world today. I guarantee you there are 5 people who need an organ transplant to survive. If you kill one healthy person, you would have 2 kidneys, a liver, 10 pints of blood, a heart and more. By its very principles, utilitarianism justifies organ harvesting.
3. Utilitarianism assumes a non-existent perfect knowledge. In other words, in order to make the best decision, one must know the consequences of your actions and the consequences of any actions resulting directly from your action. To put it simply, if you were the dean of admissions at the Vienna academy of the Arts and an incompetent student applied to your school, the utilitarian decision would be to reject the student and make room for students with more potential. The result would be that the rejected students would find work more in line with their skills. The only problem of course would be if a student by the name of Adolf Hitler applied to your school with a less the beautiful portfolio. (Yes I broke Godwin's law, deal with it) By the standard of utilitarianism, you would have committed an atrocity since your actions lead to the slaughtering of millions of humans. You should be tried at Nuremberg for such vile actions! Obviously no human has perfect knowledge, and as such utilitarianism is inapplicable.
   

Nihilism
  
The only paradigm possible for an atheist is Nihilism. Nihilism is the assumption that there is no purpose in life. Since Utilitarianism is impractical and humans are inherently evil, then only one conclusion could be made, government should control the people. People are selfish and have no reason to do what is best for society so the only logical decision would be to suppress the human will.

To conclude, if you are an atheist, you should go to Norway... Ok... probably not, but you should reconsider your views on virtually everything and probably shouldn't be a libertarian and come to the conclusion that our constitution was not made for you.


*Paradigm: A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality