Because you find it impossible to understand how ethical behavior can stem from any moral code besides one based in religion. Sounds like your problem, not ours.
Because ethics come from…?
edited to add: Do you accept, or do you deny, the definition of “atheist” I provided?
What does it mean for a position to be ethically neutral? I would say it must refrain from making judgments about what is right and wrong. Atheism is one such position.
Why not?
What do you mean by “ethically neutral”?
Why?
Pchaos, an Atheist generally adheres to some ethical system of their choosing, Atheism, being nothing more than “not a religion” does not prescribe which ethical system (if any) a particular Atheist should follow.
This is probably going to confuse things further, but I will say that this doesn’t mean that you can’t, necessarily, predict an Atheist’s beliefs about other things. Obviously since atheists are real people, and since in many places there are various cultural pressures against atheists, and various subcultures that encourage it, a given region’s atheists may tend to correlate with certain ethical beliefs. However, an atheist doesn’t follow a certain belief system because they are an atheist, it’s just that certain ethical systems lend themselves more to the ethical code of people who tend to be atheists.
Nope, you’re still not getting it. Atheism implies nothing about ethics. All it means is the lack of belief in god or gods. An atheist can have any ethical system- he/she just does not believe in god or gods. Please, please make an effort to take in new information, and abandon your incorrect previously held notions.
I mean, “I see no reason to believe that God exists” does not logically lead to “therefore I can be evil.” Ethics is a study of the way people interact with each other in a society, and a person can be ethically good or evil regardless of whether they believe that societal rules are imposed by a deity or are the result of evolutionary group interactions. (Monkey troops and fish schools have “ethics” which help them survive, but I do not believe monleys or fish have been gifted by divine revelation.)
Thank god you practice law in the US and no where near me.
Atheism - there is no such thing as god (much like there is no such thing as the flying spaghetti monster.
Ethics - a framework to establish or compare behaviours in terms of right or wrong. Several ethical systems require a source such as a god. Other systems do not.
So atheist would use an ethical system that does not require a supernatural, untestable source.
That brings this quote to mind.
(Also, nice location field :p)
Okay, it’s acceptable. But then it doesn’t help me develop an ethical system and God does.
The topic isn’t ethical systems, though-it’s atheism. By the way, are you implying that atheists don’t have ethical systems?
But fine, whatever. Let’s go with the Modified Euthyphro Dilemma. The original Euthyphro Dilemma is “is it pious becuase the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is pious?” We’ll modify it to say “does our (omnibenevolent) God want us to act in a certain way because it’s ethical, or is something ethical because God commands us to act that way?”
I contend that the latter interpretation is absurd because suddenly, for no reason, God could command me to rape everybody I’ve ever met and it would suddenly be ethical. This seems… somewhat wrong to me.
I think it’s quite clear what I am saying: the detection of real particles as a result of the dynamical Casimir effect is not in dispute, nor is the fact that ‘virtual states’ are in principle undetectable. However that these detected particles were ontologically virtual particles that have been turned in to real particles is a pov that the experimenters appear to hold, but it’s a problematic point of view for the reasons i have explained.
You’ve moved from “Atheists believe in God, they just hate him” to “Atheists don’t believe in god, so they have no ethics”.
Believe it or not, that is actual progress, and fairly speedy too.
The god of bronze age goat herders existing in a precarious world of scarcity and death is a better source of right and wrong than a framework based on empirical observations by a people capable of understanding where thunder comes from?
I’m not implying that you are unethical. All I’m saying is that your ethics didn’t stem from empiricism.
I happen to believe that some people are spiritually mature enough to function in society (be a “good person” by the standards of their peers) without the need for a threat of everlasting punishment. Those who are not are allowed by God to believe in such primitive horror stories to keep them in line.
(Go Fighting Cephalopods! Ia Ia!)
They do in that my ethics are informed by my knowledge and experience, which are empirical.
But if your point is that ethics aren’t part of science…yes, I agree. Science can tell us likely outcomes of our actions, but has nothing to say as to whether actions are right or wrong. That’s not a flaw of science, it’s just not part of what science is.
What do you think an atheist’s ethics stem from?
Actually, he’s got a point there (though most of his posts in this thread appear to be nutso). If ethics were empirical, we’d weigh everything on a utilitarian basis, but we don’t.