No, you pretty much nailed it. My moral compass is not based on any kind of “belief,” but entirely upon my owm emotional responses to my own actions. I nurture my children because it makes me feel good to nurture my children, not because I think there’s any kind of rule about it or because “I believe it is right.” I avoid hurting people because it makes me feel bad to hurt people, not because I think it’s violates any sort of external rule.
This is the part where somebody brings up serial killers or Nazis and asks if they’re just following their own moral compass and what makes mine more “valid” than theirs. The answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second is that the word “validity” has no application to morality any more than it has any application to taste in beer.
The next question then is what gives anybody the right or authority to place any behavioral parameters on others? (If you think rape is wrong and I think it’s right, who are you to tell me I can’t do it?) The answer is that the “authority” (for lack of a better word) comes from your own moral sense and needs to come from nowhere else. If you feel morally obligated to protect others from rape, then that’s what you do. It doesn’t have to be justified. You’re just following your own code. If that conflicts with someone else, then there’s going to be a power struggle and whoever wins, wins.
Fortunately, this doesn’t lead to the kind of anarchy and chaos that it sounds like it might because, as it turns out, a lot of our emotional responses to such things are hardwired into our biology and basically shared. Most people have an empathic response which causes them to feel distress and anxiety at the suffering of others. That means it’s pretty easy for the vast majority to agree that we can pool our collective power to try to prevent a microspcopic minority from engaging in behavior which destabalizes our communities or causes us severe emotional distress.
Though you have backed away from this as an objective morality, I would contest it even as the necessary morality taken from your basis in evolutionary theory. It is not objectively better, from an evolutionary standpoint, not to murder, rape, steal, and lie. Observe the “morality” of non-sapient species which we can say is based purely on instinctual evolutionary pressure. Murder, rape, theft, and deception are not uncommon.
Humans are a social animal. We are evolved to survive in populations, not as individuals. Therefore our “ethical” hardwiring (e.g. the empathic response) serves to protect the stability of communities rather than to serve the immediate self-interests of individuals. Humans are not the only animal for which this is true.
For me, losing any faith had the exact opposite effect. Instead of those poor people being poor for a reason, or having some great potential future in heaven, or being under God’s watch, suddenly all they have is me. All we have is each other. All we’ve got is one life. I can’t just say that they’ll be rewarded in heaven, and I don’t have to believe in some dude claiming the poor will always be with us.
I have made a LONG study of religion in an attempt to answer
my questions about why I don’t believe in fairy tales.
I believe in strict evolutionary theory. In the early days of
mankind, those who believed that the shaman, witch doctor,
healer, holy man, etc. could heal them actually lived longer
than those who did not believe.
Those who lived longer were able to procreate more, have
more DNA replicate and pass on the ability to believe.
Man is born with a need to believe in a higher power.
Like language and music, religion is learned.
Would there be religion without language or music?
Did you ever know a evalgelical preacher who could
not sing and sermonize?
The same evolutionary brain structure which allows
learning of music and languages also controls the
belief in God(s).
If a human believes in God, there is a god.
Up until death. After that, who knows?
Certain things we do even if we would rather not do such as stealing, killing or harming others ends up harming us in the long run. If we look out for others or make laws it is to help civilization continue and is also for our own betterment. Most of the 10 commandments are just common sense such as: If I can steal from you or kill you it would give others the right to do the same so being good to others is a way to have a better world.
Some cultures have different moral codes,such as even in the way we dress in our culture it is considerd immoral to go with out clothing, but in others it is not.
You just don’t understand the conversation. You keep demanding that I prove that morality is “not a belief,” but it seems to escape your comprehension that that it’s nonsensical to demand that someone else prove they “don’t believe” something. I have no moral “beliefs,” yet I still have a personal morality, therefore morality is not a belief. QED. The burden is on you to either prove that I have no personal morality or that my personal morality is based on “belief” rather my own selfish desire to avoid behaviors which cause me biologically programmed emotional distress or “guilt.”
“Belief” itself is still a subjective emotional response to external stimuli (i.e an aesthetic) anyway, so there’s no way to avoid having to define morality as an aesthetic and aesthetics don’t have to be “justified.”
There have been many periods in my life when I did not believe in a God, and while that didn’t lead me to throw all my principles out the window, I did feel less accountable and did get myself in more trouble by making bad choices.
It’s sort of like that thing about false idols - praying to God for guidance brings me out of myself and into the bigger picture. If I’m just being self-referential, then I don’t reach as far or try as hard, and it’s easier to rationalize my choices.
That’s not to say I keep on the straight and narrow out of fear. I don’t buy the Judeo-Christian “thunderbolts and lightning” literal God in the Bible for one minute, either. Some of the principles in the Bible, however, have been valuable and meaningful to me. Along with many other religious texts.
Disclaimer: I do not ascribe to any name-brand religions.
Short answer: I don’t really know.
“Absence of God” probably implies different things to me than it does to you (or, for that matter, to most theistic people), although this board really is a special and different place. I know the conventional image is that folks with religious beliefs ascribe to a set of “moral rules” or “moral values” and confine their behaviors accordingly in a way that has more to do with “obedience to a god who punishes the disobedient” than with “what is inherently right and how shall you live to make your life meaningful and rich and fulfilling etc”; that conventional image is one I’ve encountered among the religious themselves and among atheists and agnostics who wonder at the religious for being so intimidated by a tyrannical entity the existence of whom they find less than compellingly demonstrated.
The best “translation into the atheist” I can give would run kind of like this:
If you woke up tomorrow totally convinced that every value, belief, priority, and principle you previously ascribed to, and every possible alternative for that matter, was totally arbitrary —that not one single jot of any of it was “good” in any meaningful way, none of it defensible from logic, first principles, appeal to anything such that the appealing to didn’t itself seem totally random and arbitrary, such that no moral position or human behavior seemed to you to be in any shape way fashion or form any worse or any better than any other…if everything from the most reductionistic of nerve-ending pleasures to the most abstract sense of happiness felt to you like bait, manipulation, conditioned response, indoctrinated ideological content, etc, and you despaired of anything ever again allowing you to feel like more than a pathetic blob of autonomic nerve tissue…
Would your set of morals change? Would your behavior change? If so, how?
Best answer I can give you is that I would not have a set of morals (pretty much by definition, see above, nothing would matter). My behavior, similarly, would not matter, but I’m not sure how I would behave…I’d probably sit around bleakly for awhile and then shoot myself, but I’m not sure.
As a recently ex-Catholic, I still believe in the same basic morals, but I have a harder time adhering to some, and an easier time following others. I believed because I thought the religion supported the morals I already had, not the other way around. In most ways, I still think this.
My behavior and feelings have changed, because I no longer believe God wants me to destroy myself to please him. That’s made a difference, all right.
I can’t say I woke up and stopped believing in God (I’m not sure, now) but losing faith in his Church is a fairly similar experience. It was never easy, but I always had that absolute certainty that it would be all right in the end. I no longer believe that, and it’s hard to lose it, but it’s also helped me in many ways.