Atheist Ethics: Teleportation

Here’s a moral dilemma for the sci-fi fans. Consider a form of teleportation in which you can walk into a pod in Chicago where your body is deconstructed molecule by molecule providing the information that is used to make copies of those molecules to be built again at the chosen destination, let’s say Tokyo. While this a million times faster than any other mode of transportation, it’s legitimate to say that the you in Chicago painlessly and instantaneously died while a perfect clone of you was born in Tokyo. From the perspective of the new and now only you in Tokyo, it seems like you were “beamed-up” Star Trek style, with your last memory walking into the Chicago pod. From the perspective of the old you in Chicago, well, there is no longer a perspective to be had.

Is this a morally acceptable technology to you? For well-adjusted atheists, I think it should be.

For the most part, atheists don’t believe in souls. Post-deconstruction the teleporter is a non-entity, I needn’t worry that the essence of the Chicago teleporter is going anywhere. I can imagine that a person who believed every time teleportation was used someone would be condemned to hell, exalted to heaven, or prematurely partaking in another afterlife would oppose the technology.

For the most part, atheists don’t accept transcendent moral standards. The act of teleportation could be seen as a willful killing and therefore immoral according to the most popular verses of most holy books. If we consider teleportation in regards to the negative impact of involved parties, one could argue that it isn’t immoral at all. Even if we see the Chicagoan's action as suicide, it lacks all the negative consequences of a suicide. The person’s replacement is indistinguishable from the original, meaning there is no one to morn. The victim is painlessly turned off knowing that a redundancy will be turned on elsewhere.

Where do you stand on this? Is it moral? Would you do it? Why or why not?

Mortality Week: Could God Kill Himself?

Could God create a stone so heavy even He couldn’t lift it? How does God know what it is like to learn if He has always known everything? These are just a couple examples of logic busting paradoxes that an idealized deity runs into. I’ve posed these questions to apologists who explain them away as illogical...but that’s kind of the point. If they think God can hold his omnipotent title while being confined by logic, fine. Thinking about mortality this week, I thought of a new question. Could God kill himself?

There is nothing illogical about this question. Suicide is something you or I can do fairly easily (although I don’t recommend you try.) I’ve reached out to a few high-profile apologists with this question. No answers. None. I’ve never gotten such a lack of feedback from these people.* I guess it’s because they know the repercussions of the question.

I’ve come to realize that I may never be able to convince a true believer that God is imaginary, but if this question can convince them that God is either mortal or less-than-omnipotent, I’m at least making some headway.

From my understanding, the biblically accurate answer is that yes, God could kill himself. We are made in his image, so anything we can do, he should be able to accomplish. A theist might argue that God can’t sin and suicide is a sin. To this I say that He clearly sins in the bible by wiping out masses of people on more than one occasion. The theist would then either have to grant me that God sins or take the stance that anything God does is inherently not a sin, which makes suicide not a sin if and when God commits it. This isn’t a question of whether God would commit suicide, it is a question if He could.

Any theists who would like to weight in on this, please do so in the comments or by email or on Twitter or by...carrier pigeon? Anything, just show me how I’m wrong. Until then, let’s just agree that your God ain’t what He used to be.

Upon further Googling, I realize that I'm not the first to ponder this question--even though I arrived at it organically. The only answers out there from the theist perspective I have already covered or fall under the "puny humans can't comprehend God" category. These same people then go on to explain all about God...paradoxes within paradoxes.