Prominent atheists, like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, have expressed their support for incest. They argue that as long as sex is between two consenting adults, then it should be permitted, even if it’s between mother and son, daughter and father, or siblings with each other.

This is a familiar pattern in atheistic/secular ethics: taboo breaking. Fornication was always seen as immoral, but then secular ethics tells us that that is just an irrational taboo. Sodomy was always seen as vile, but then secular ethics tells us that that is just an irrational taboo born out of emotionality rather than reason and is therefore invalid.

And now the same thought process applies to sex with immediate family members.

But why should this habitual boundary-stomping and taboo-breaking from atheists stop there? What is stopping us from seeing the idea of consent as an irrational taboo driven by emotion? What makes consent so different from these other discarded taboos? An atheist/secularist could argue that just like backwards people believed sodomy to be a disgusting and unnatural, ungodly act, similarly backwards people irrationally believe that sex without consent is a disgusting violation and, in both cases, there is no rational, scientific reason to abide by such outdated taboos.

Now before anyone accuses me of promoting rape, I am simply arguing on the basis of atheist morality, not my own. Does atheistic/secular morality provide a rational or scientific justification for the importance of consent? Not at all.

The vast majority of atheists today are liberals and they abide by liberal utilitarian ethics. According to utilitarianism, whatever maximizes pleasure and minimizes harm, broadly speaking, is morally good. And whatever maximizes harm and minimizes pleasure is morally evil. As they often put it, what doesn’t harm others should be legal and morally permissible. This notion of harm and pleasure is implicit in all liberal arguments regarding sexuality. A taboo, according to utilitarianism, is meaningless because pleasure and harm are the ultimate determinants of morality, not whether or not people “feel icky” (as they put it).

Well, in that case, there are numerous examples of non-consensual acts that increase total pleasure and minimize harm. Consider voyeurism. A utilitarian could install a secret camera in a women’s public bathroom and broadcast a live feed to millions of voyeurs around the world. Their aggregate pleasure would skyrocket, and there would be minimal harm since the women wouldn’t know that they are being recorded. Their faces could also be blurred to protect their identities. Either way, the overall pleasure far outweighs the harm. An atheist could say, look, there is nothing wrong with this since no one is harmed and the net pleasure is huge, and the insistence on consent is just a backwards silly taboo that we all need to collectively get over. If atheists and liberal secularists were consistent, they would promote this kind of voyeurism just as much as they promote incest, LGBT, etc.

This is among the many reasons atheism and secularism more broadly are nihilistic and, when taken to their ultimate conclusions, are clearly absurd and should be rejected by all rational people.