Atheism, and how it relates to amorality.

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Short answer: It doesn't.


Long Answer: My morals come from the same place yours did: family, society, and culture (no, laws do not give you morality - but they may try to coincide with a society's perceptions of it so long as they have a secular purpose and do not infringe on established rights).

Morality that is literally taught in Abrahamic texts is appalling and dependant on some unknown being. Example: God commands you to enslave thousands of people because they are of a different ethnicity, culture, or tribe. Suddenly, it becomes moral in this situation because God said it. Any rationally thinking person will say that slavery is wrong 100% of the time, always. Yet the Abrahamic god commands that many times in the OT, including mass infanticide, genocide, rape, child molestation, animal sacrifice, genital mutilation, need I go on (because I could)?

You may say that the OT is a bunch of hogwash, or even commit a blaring logical fallacy in saying it was okay for the people in that time (morality is subjective and changes, as does God's perception of it, eh?) - but then I must ask you the question why the OT in included in holy text at all.

Go ahead and point to Jesus and the sermon on the mount as the greatest (and obviously divinely inspired) speech ever ( http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php? ... _the_mount ). Tell me how much his great morals of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is so utterly supreme and never upon the face of the Earth prior to Jesus's existence, and that his church followed his supposed words to the T. 'Cept you'd be telling falsehood. To take Do unto others as an example, suppose I would want to have a stranger surprise me with random buttsex in public. According to Jesus's words, it would be appropriate for me to surprise buttsex you, too.

Begin cookie-cutter apologetics that have been refuted a hundred thousand times over. Hopefully this thread will make one extra person think critically about their anchor-biases, their closely held beliefs, those things they never questioned.

No idea is safe from criticism - and why should one be?

child molestation, you mean arranged marriages?
rape, hmmm, it doesn't look like there is a command from God to promote actual rape in the OT, however, rape was not as bad to them as it is now to western culture, I could say that likely, the mainly bad thing about it was about having sex outside marriage and adultery.

Unless you relate arranged marriages as a form of rape, which I think it could be stated like that, but probably it wouldn't be exactly like that in most cases at the time.


Well, that's a good question, in the NT, Jesus was changing and abolishing OT practices, because of he having died in the cross, which they could argue, and, I can't really succesfuly answer why is still included in the Bible if most of the laws and practices from it were abolished, only that it is considered to be a direct inspiration from God, dictated to the prophets, I suppose it could be said that it was a pre-christian era, prophecies about a future Messiah which could relate to the NT, it looks to me that some denominations focus more in the NT, especially the gospels than the rest.


well, if you really love people to buttsex you, it is quite reasonable that you would like to do that to others, hoping they would love it as much as you do.

I can say that the origin of morality had their whole basis on religion, and it doesn't look like it was Judaism that created the first moral code, rather older ones.

There is nothing wrong with Atheism. A good bit of Atheist people have very good moral background and stsndings. You don't have to believe in God to reach spiritual enlightenment. You just got to set standards for yourself and live a happy life rich of the practice of Good Moral values & keep yourself alive & happy as long as possible.

Ok then, will anyone tell me what metaethical view that atheists follow?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethic ... c_theories

It seems to me that atheists would likely reject most ethically realist theories, because the premises:

1. Ethical sentences express propositions.
2. Some such propositions are true.
3. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion.

Are a bit of a pain to try to justify.

This leaves atheists with subjective views, error theory, and noncognitivism. Well, if atheists are moral by subjective views, then why would this mean *anything*? It is sort of like saying, well, "we atheists are moral because we follow a set of conventions", and thus in turn proves itself meaningless. However, error theory and noncognitivism both deny the reality of morality, preventing atheists from actually being meaningfully moral.

Because of this, well, atheism would seem more likely than theism to require amorality, as theists by and large accept some variant of moral realism, either that or Divine Command theory.

People might disagree with my assessment, however, keeping in mind the facts I have put forward, what criticism will people come up with?

To answer the OP:

Not all views consider morals to come from the same place as those 3 sources, most moral realism assumes that there is something above this, either the result of human rationality, or human purpose, or divine action or something like this that morals arise from. The notion that morality arose from those 3 sources seems to be an assertion of moral relativism, and the issue with this is that moral relativism isn't considered a respected view in academic moral philosophy, and if you sort of look at it, it almost seems to reduce down to meaninglessness or error theory, as nothing absolutely makes those 3 sources of relative morality to be valid, and if so, then why can't *anything* be valid? If anything is valid, then it quickly comes that nothing is valid, as all moral claims invalidate other moral cliams.


Well, the morality that is taught in Abrahamic texts is usually considered dependent upon God, which most Christians consider the only valid source of morality.


And *now* we are shifting to moral realism, which seems to negate the notion that your morality came from those 3 sources, unless you claim to know what every family and every part of culture teach. The problem with the shift to moral realism is simply that your statement implies that "rationally thinking person(s)" mostly did not exist until somewhere after the Enlightenment, forcing us to claim that important philsophers such as Plato, and Aristotle(whose work on logic was foundational for a millennia after his death) were *not* rational, and that seems hard to argue given that such minds seem of a higher quality than those of most people.


The logical fallacy was committed on your end first, by declaring a subjective basis for morality. In any case, this is not necessarily a logical fallacy, Divine Command theory is a questionable metaethical theory but not one that is necessarily considered faulty. In any case, given that the major issues in the OT were not long-lasting commandments but rather commands for a given situation, or things that were later altered by the actions of Christ, the Christian messiah, the problem is not as great as you seem to suppose.


Umm.... I think this is considered bad theology, the statement "Do unto others" should really be looked at as being a part of the theme "Love your neighbor as yourself", and it isn't loving your neighbor as yourself if you simply impose your own will upon them. Now, we can argue that people who hate themselves can do these things, but given that we are supposed to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." and treat people as we would treat God: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." and there is nothing suggesting that God likes surprise buttsex.


Ok... well... mostly all I think that must be done to address your ideas is just show how you seem inconsistent or questionable.

Hey Awesome, here's a secret:

Atheism isn't a religion.
Atheism has no tenets.
Atheism is not a belief itself, only the lack of belief in gods.
Atheism has no requirement, except that you do not accept the claim that one or more gods exist.
Atheism tells you nothing about a person, except their stance on one issue.

The fact that you are lumping together Secular Humanists, atheist Nihilists, areligious people, most Buddhists, most Taoists, many Nature-Worshipers, Raelians, Matrix-believers, Druids, and countless other philosophical systems that also happen to lack belief in gods, and then asking me to tell you how all of these hundreds of millions of people define their ethos, much less where their individual ethic stances have originated, is asinine.

And I never made a blanket-statment "We atheists are moral", just as no sane Christian would make an equivalent statement: "We Christians are moral" after realizing that the Westboro Baptist Church and the Catholic Clergy that hides pedophile priests are both very, very Christian - not to mention the Templar and Kingdom of Jerusalem in the days of the Crusades.

I'll get to your responses a bit later, gotta go tutor some math. I wish I had a laptop -_-

Well, the issue that most "religionists" would make is that without god you have a sh***y, if not absurd, justification for morals, as they would generally demand a reason to hold those morals rather than the natural history of your beliefs.

Legato, I know all of this stuff, however, usually a person acting on behalf of "atheism" is acting upon behalf of a particular sect within atheism, as most atheist groups don't *care* about being atheist, as it isn't part of what defines them as what they are. You can see this later in your statement, as out of the tens of beliefs you cite, some of them relatively esoteric, only two of those beliefs tend to define themselves by their atheism, and if we include the "areligious" group, as being defined by atheism, we then have 3 groups. These 3 groups tend to fall victim to a number of my criticisms. (It could be argued that reductionist/scientific rationalism, not included, could be added for a 4th group that was not mentioned, but it is also similar in that it is common in what is considered "atheist" and it usually does not have a very well-formulated view of morality)

Legato, the issue is that you cannot represent a non-belief, and thus when you were representing atheism, you were not representing a non-belief and this can be seen in your stated "source of morals", but rather representing a particular branch of atheism, that most people have some familiarity with.


Actually, I know about a significant number of these groups, and you made the first overstep by declaring the source of morality for atheists. The atheist nihilist will tell you that he is an amoralist. The areligious person will not have thought much about the matter. Most of the religious atheist groups will derive morality from some religious precept. Secular humanists are perhaps the fuzziest group out of all of these. In any case, my question *is* valid, because you decided to claim that there is no connection between the 2, despite the fact that there are some major groups in atheism that are amoral, but almost no amoral groups of theists.


You made the blanket statement: "Atheism doesn't relate to amorality", which is hard to deny as there are few theistic amoralists. Umm.... honestly, this depends on how we define "Christian" and define morality, and define claiming that something is moral. I mean, do Christians tend to think that their group is better than all other groups on the moral plane? Yes, in fact, they'd say that Christians would have to be better, as "without faith it is impossible to please him(God)", and would define morality to be in relationship to pleasing God. ""Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."" In any case, do you know what the brunt of my criticism is? That morality is being taken for granted. If morality demands a worship of God, as Christians(the majority strongly theistic group as noted by the fact that you took the time to directly address that group) could argue, then atheists are automatically committing an immoral act without any concern, and of course, by their own standards, they could argue that atheists are necessarily amoral or immoral(depending upon how we want to define amoral), which is something I'd want to bring up, because then atheism has a very necessary relationship to amorality, and it seems as if the problem of different standards of behavior is just swept under the rug.

Atheists can follow any number of moral codes or none, as long as they don't use God as justification. Atheists can even follow most Christian morals if they wish, as long as there is no belief in God. I think they follow a subjective morality because there can be no objective one. Subjective morality doesn't imply amorality or immorality only that individuals judge what is moral on their own. They can use their inherent compassion as a social primate as a guide. Even with moral codes, there is always a situation that is not predicted by that code.

Scientists have found that many primate have an innate sense of fairness, so it seems that morality is biological and that instead of religion creating it, it is responsible for the morality codified into religion.

While I don't get morality from my spiritual practices, I have found that atheism did have a very negative effect on me. I wanted to kill myself because I couldn't see any point to living anymore. The only people who I think can really get away with being atheist are people who don't have strong emotions to begin with, otherwise they have to latch unto some cause, some point to push down peoples throats that can often end up as dogmatic and narrow minded as blind followers of fundamentalist religion.

Well, this already eliminates Divine Command metaethics.

Right, and if they follow a subjective morality, then I would argue that this ultimately disintegrates into no morality, as I argue later.



Well, and as twoshots points out the issue isn't the natural history of morality, but rather how this is morality.



Yes, people have instincts, but calling these instincts moral is a leap. The problem is that to accept morality as a valid thing, one must recognize that moral statements are truth claims, and a moral truth claim is completely different from a statement about primate instincts. One must prove that these primate instincts lead to a moral fact.

I never saw a need for a meaning to begin with, I also prefer the truth over false comfort which is why I don't believe in spirits. But honestly I'd probably be somewhat disappointed if spirits did exist considering how human the idea is.

How does a religionist justify their morality? God said so? Fear of eternal damnation in Hell? Fear of being punished is really still a premoral stage of psychological development, and blind obedience—even if it is to your holy god—is a weakness of character, a vice (i.e., immorality, in my eyes).

Fear of being punished does not have metaethical weight though, so that isn't what twoshots is talking about.

As for blind obedience, well... one, obeying a being that you know knows more about a matter than you do, or that has rightful authority doesn't seem bad a priori, another thing is that if Divine Command theory is true, then your own opinions on it are just noise and inconsequential.

In any case, the religionist has a greater ability to justify morality given that the worldview of the religionist is *filled* with objective, non-material, anthropocentric things, but a non-religionist world is usually lacks items with those 3 qualities. This leads into an important argument for error theory, the argument from queerness. If morality exists, it posts qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe, and if we can know what morality is, then we must have some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. These 2 problems don't cause issues for the religionist, because the world they already posit holds a number of things with those 3 properties, and usually depend upon a special faculty of knowledge unlike empirical or rational, which means that moral ideas are more consistent to their worldview. If you can cut spiritual beings away, then you should have *already* cut moral facts away.

It seems what twoshots states, to be very similar to what Ragtime was arguing in his thread about stealing, that without God and religion, we would have nothing left but nihilism. I can understand that point of view, and how morality is easily more justified from religion than from a secular perspective, however, morality is seem to be relative inside religion, and there lies the conflict as well, and to know which morality is the correct one or not, is something that it seem to be somewhat problematic to debate in favor I believe, and may be the reason for criticism from a secular perspective, and not without conflict.

Given that religion from industralized cultures, have had to adjust with new scientific discoveries (although there is always conflict with it to some degree) and social changes, therefore said morality has had to shape out of necessity and convenience, influenced by their history as well as their culture, which differs from others. And there is also the question, "how can they know what God wants?" and the answer of that is not just one, but plenty, and they differ and disagree with each other.

As for the relativity of religion within religion, this seems to be more minor, as within religion, there is still a means of proper epistemic grounding for moral beliefs. The failure to find a perfect absolute is thus a smaller issue, unless one regards all possible theological projects for discovering this morality as failures.

In any case, I would probably support moral nihilism or at least skepticism, and consider this entire issue of morality to be useless. I mean, there is a *lot* that has to be addressed when dealing with moral claims.

In any case, I haven't been to Ragtime's thread because it is really long, and I don't want to wade through *everything*, like it expanded rather quickly, and I didn't get involved at the moment when I would be optimally interested.

The Ten Commandments, as they relate to human conduct, can be followed as secular rules for non-believers. The simple injunctions against killing, stealing, lying, rape, jealousy and adultery do not IMO require an Almighty God to justify them. These simple rules are still in place after 2000 years because of their stark utility. They function to hold a society together. It should be noted that, for the ancient Israelites who first received these commandments, they were both religious law and the law of the land.

The purpose of these rules are more important than their origin, if they are to be judged on how they affect society. Find your own reason to follow these commandments. Find your own inspiration.