The original post quoted Hitchens saying this:
"Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."
I replied:
"I think that there are many kinds of ethical statements that might be expected from believers that one wouldn't expect to hear from non-believers."
Hitchens refused to accept an ethical statement specific to a certain morality
There are countless ethical statements that a religious believer might make that one wouldn't expect to hear from a religious non-believer. Positive ethical statements containing the phrase "God's will" for example. Buddhist statements about "meritorious acts" (where 'merit' is understood in the Buddhist sense), and so on.
The point being that people will often conceptualize morality differently and express it in different language, depending on part on their culture and on their religious tradition.
So arguably, the first clause in Hitchens' challenge is trivial and easily met. Whether or not he accepts it is a matter for him, not for me.
Turning to the second clause in the Hitchens quote, to the question:
"Name me... an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.
Now we are talking about actions as opposed to statements. (Of course when somebody makes a statement, he or she is performing an action.)
If we accept the idea of inner actions (and I do), then somebody might want to ask Hitchens whether an atheist can truly worship God. A theist might consider that to be the prototypical ethical action. A Buddhist prostrating himself before a statue of the Buddha is performing a very different inner action than a non-Buddhist would be performing if he or she simply performed the bodily motions of prostration before the same statue while feeling silly.
So from the inner-action perspective, Hitchens' challenge has again been met. Hitchens no doubt would strenuously object that a Buddhist prostrating himself before a statue isn't truly an ethical action and doesn't count. But the Buddhist would respond that doing such things aids in overcoming one's fixation on self, and in the Buddhist scheme that's absolutely fundamental to ethical motivation.
In my last post, I wrote:
Having said that, I don't believe that in their real-world behavior, religious believers are any more moral on average than non-believers.
The point that I was making there, is that in their daily secular lives, when they are at work, shopping or walking down the street, performing acts that aren't specifically religious in nature, I don't think that on average, religious and non-religious people differ a whole lot ethically. Unless people are wearing distinctive dress or performing specifically religious acts, it's hard to determine an individual's religious adherence, or lack of it, just from watching their everyday behavior.
The fundamental issue in this secular external-action context isn't whether or not a religious-believer is capable of performing a kind of moral act that's unique only to religious believers. That's kind of a straw-man question. Following Hitchens, we are now excluding specifically religious acts from consideration.
At this point the deeper question has become whether or not religious believers are more or less apt to perform exactly the same kind of moral acts that all of us recognize in our daily lives. Are they compassionate? Are they courageous? Are they fair?
Everyone is capable of doing those kind of things. The real question is whether they are motivated to do them.
