Atheists, Explain Yourselves.

Great Debates
41

I think being an athiest drives me to be more moral, because I have no deity I can go to for forgiveness of my sins.

If I have an ethical lapse and harm someone, there is no absolution. I have to live with the consequences of my actions until the day I die. There is no God who will judge me after death, but on my deathbed I have to make peace with who I was, what I did, and whether or not I left the world a better place for having had me in it. Every action I take from now until then will weigh on that determination.

As for how I form my ethics, it’s as the others have said: Empathy, the desire to not be a parasite, the desire to set a good example for my child, and for my own satisfaction that I am living in accordance with my own values, which I have attempted to build up through education and rational introspection.

I place a heavier emphasis on secular philosophy than most religious people do. I’ve read widely from philosophers across the spectrum and made my own decisions as to what is right and wrong after integrating it all. Then I try to live my life in accordance with that. It’s important to my own self-esteem that I live according to my moral code and limit my hypocrisy to the smallest possible amount. I don’t always achieve it, but I try. And I have to take responsibility if I fail.

42

Make the assumption that there is no purpose in life. A chemical reaction happened to make something that lasted. Some more chemical reactions caused that to morph into something else which was able to self-propagate, and so on, until after a billion years of snowballing, you’ve got life. There is no greater meaning.

Regardless of whether there’s a meaning or not, I’m still stuck here living my life. If I’m enjoying myself, then I have no particular impetus to change the status quo. So long as I am living, in fact, I may as well do my best to enjoy the experience.

But, this is just as true of everyone else. We all want to enjoy ourselves, and that’s one of those things where more is always better. But say that for each of us, our idea of enjoyment is growing up to become an astronaut. Well, at the moment, it’s infeasible for all 6 billion people on the planet to become astronauts. Due to scarcity, for every pile of happiness some percentage of everyone has to get the shaft.

Now yeah, we could just duke it out until the population of the planet was low enough that everyone who remained could get everything they ever wanted and a pony besides, but fortunately we’re smarter than that. We can’t all have everything we want, but we can get enough so long as we figure out rule systems for fair competition. None of us has any apparent right to say that they’ve got more right to anything than any one else. If we both want the last iPod on the planet, killing each other over it is stupid. We pick a method of competition – e.g. financial – and the loser just has to accept taking a behind-the-times CD player instead.

The big rule, though, is that I have zero power versus any other individual. I can’t force you to do anything. I’m not greater than you or more important than you. If you piss me off and ruin my happy, that doesn’t give me the right to kill you. The rules of the game are decided by all of us via some means that we agree upon as being fair (i.e. representative democracy) and policed by people who we agree upon as arbitrators (i.e. police and courts). Just because you’re pissing me off doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong according to any reasonable rule of the world. If everyone had the unilateral ability to decide the rules – “Talk too much and I’ll kill you” – we’d have chaos and no one would be happy. I wouldn’t be safe myself in such a world. In order to be happy most of the time, some of the time I’m going to have to suck it up and co-exist with people who piss me off. To some percentage of them, after all, I piss them off and I’m fairly sure that I don’t consider myself as worthy of death or any other punishment.

On the other hand, we are all individuals. Some of us care more about being an astronaut whereas others couldn’t care less. We could simply dole out everything equally, but that wouldn’t really work very effectively. If you give me a Barbie Doll and a video of porn, then I’m going to trade the Barbie Doll away to a little girl in exchange for video of porn that was alloted to her. Now she has two Barbie Dolls and I have two vids of pornography – we’re both happier than we would have been if we’d simply split everything evenly. So when we do split up all of the joys of the world, we want something like a bidding system.

How much does each person have to bid with? In our modern world, that’s determined by how much they’ve done to make others happy. If you were willing and capable of busting your ass and becoming a doctor, society will give you a bunch of chips to bid with. If you figure that you’d be miserable if you had to work hard and are happier as a lazy bastard, so you become a cashier at a porn shop, then you get less chips, but hey you’ve presumably made the choice that maximizes your happiness. Getting the extra cred with the rest of the world wasn’t worth it to you.

Now if there was an actual all-knowing, all-powerful God, then he’d be able to come in and truly maximize everything. He could make us all astronauts who wanted to be, if he was willing to be a giving soul. Or, he could at least divy up all of the world’s joys at the true perfect ratios instead of the closest approximation that a global market and modern system of representative governance allows. Unfortunately, if he does exist, he didn’t even bother to suggest either of those systems when he wrote his big book, so there’s not a ton of evidence that he’s a giving soul, let alone a very thoughtful one.

43

I can’t add anything meaningful to this. My thoughts have been summarised very neatly by everyone else.

As this issue keeps popping up in other threads I’ll certainly be keeping a link to this one. It really does say all that needs to be said.

44

When I do good, like helping others, I feel good. When I do bad, like hurting others, I feel bad. I don’t like feeling bad.

No God required.

45

This seems more like a survey than a debate, so I’ll give another vote for the consensus.

If I can assume you have a reasonable set of morals, then I can assume that you got them the same place I got mine, from growing up in a more or less civilised community and learning what was reasonable. I don’t need to codify that system, and haven’t, so can’t answer your specific question.

Unlike you, I can stop there, and everything is easy and straightforward. I don’t have the Christians’ problem of having to reconcile our common morality with the patently immoral and absurd code set out in a random set of texts which my religious community holds up as the infallible word of God. I don’t have to fret about how and why people who don’t share my religion nevertheless seem to behave just as morally as those who do.

It probably doesn’t come across well in the theological ‘debates’ on this forum, but most atheists in the West don’t think that Christians (or Muslims) are bad people. We really can ‘regret the stupidity without insisting that you are stupid’. :smiley:

46

Lots of good replies in this thread.

The foundation for any ethical system is empathy. We also seem to have an instinct for what behaviours are right and wrong, the majority of people give the same responses to questions like the runaway train dilemma. However, this moral sense should be treated with a degree of distrust, the results can be logically contradictory. To give an example, my instinctive response to being wronged might be disproportionate retribution, which would not be moral or consistent. I am not happy when people behave this way to me when I do something wrong. Collective responsibility is another common moral fallacy. Just because some members of a group committed an act does not mean other members of that group deserve to be punished for it. A recent example of this was the spate of Facebook comments regarding the Japanese tsunami as payback for the attack on pearl harbour. Impartiality and reason are required to make an ethical system work.

Various religious texts may have worthwhile things to say on the subject of morality, but treating them as canonical or interpreting them literally is dangerous. A lot of the bible is confused and some of it is plain nasty, especially the old testament. Looking at one of the commandments in Exodus:

Punishing children for the deeds of their parents, very moral. Here, God is pushing the idea of collective responsibility, and all the misery that brings when grievances are perpetuated down the generations. There is also a glaring logical contradiction. Are the grandchildren of obedient Christian grandparents with lapsed parents subject to “punishment to the third and fourth generation” or “steadfast love to the thousandth generation”?

47

One of my favorite quotes on this subject is by physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg who said:

I think it says it all.

48

My ethics is loosely based in utilitarianism. I try to increase the pleasure and well-being of myself and people around me, while decreasing their suffering. I sometimes place a small priority on my own well-being over that of others, simply because I know more about myself and can do more for myself than I can for others. But I will help others if I can determine that their gain is greater than what I give up. Conversely, though, I try to prioritize the suffering of others over my own. If I do something to harm myself, well, that’s my own damn fault. But nobody else deserves to suffer from my actions.

Of course it’s almost always impossible to actually solve the utilitarian calculus of maximizing well-being. So in practice I tend to rely on empathy and the Golden Rule.

49

I was reared in a religious household and taught that Christianity was the basis for morality. Not in so many words, of course, but that the bible and Christian leaders (and tracts and pamphlets) spelled out what was right and wrong and God was watching all the time (even the tiny sparrows.) One of my earliest breaks with religion was with the obvious difference between the morality that church leaders preach and the things they actually do. If they actually believe what they say then they are trying to game the system somehow and I would think a real God wouldn’t be fool enough to fall for it.

In any case, I don’t really know all the reasoning that goes into a moral choice. Experience, childhood training, empathy, who knows? I do know that my inability to fully justify each choice I make in a rational way doesn’t imply that an all powerful being must be running the show. Anyone who claims to have a lock on what is moral and what is not moral is selling something.

50

In terms of empirical investigation into morality, the better established models of moral development rank doing things from a stance of principles about what is right or wrong to do, or from a stance of applying universal beliefs about justice, as more developed moral reasoning than doing things because you are told to or doing things out of mutual reciprocity.

From that perspective, it’s hard to see how a god would be involved in the process at the more advanced stages. You might argue for an indirect, invisible role in compelling (some) people to adopt universal beliefs or to apply more general principles, I suppose. From the individual’s perspective though, any time they invoke a god as a justification for doing the right thing, it’s going to indicate a primary stage of moral development.

51

What gives you any idea that I haven’t? The pair essentially boil down to the same thing, and I am not going to tweak on every interpretation.

I am the Lord your God Sure, whatever you say, bub. Got me there.

You shall have no other gods before me No problem; I don’t believe in any of them

You shall not make for yourself an idol Nope, haven’t done that.

Do not take the name of the Lord in vain Depending on the interpretation, I’m in the clear there.

Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy *I never do shit on Sunday, anyway. *

Honor your father and mother I did; now they’re dead

You shall not kill/murder Got that one covered.

You shall not commit adultery Got that one covered, too.

You shall not steal Haven’t done that since I was a teenager.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor Nope.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife Nope. She’s old and fat.

You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. Nope.
Anything else I can get for you?

52

If the OP meant “the problem of evil/suffering” when he said “the problem of pain,” then this is completely right - the problem of suffering is a problem only if someone believes there’s an all-powerful, benevolent God. To atheists, suffering is bad, but it isn’t a problem for our system of beliefs.

SSgtBaloo, care to come back and explain yourself some? Is this what you meant?

And the unstated assumption in your OP seems to be that atheists would have no grounding for their morals/ethics, or that it’s mysterious to you how we come up with our morals. Care to explain that some more? What’s your view, and why?

53

Of course not. I did say excessive. Library fines help fund the library, and harm no one when no one is waiting for the book. And it is not like I can’t afford them. My aversion to them is completely irrational. My point was that my morality is based on either my genes or some early training (which I doubt, since my brother doesn’t have my problem) and neither rational calculation or fear of a deity.

54

Meh, that’s needlessly inflammatory and not the whole picture. Replace “religion” with “an ideology” and you’ve got a more accurate AND less flamebaity statement.

55

Your “neighbor” doesn’t just mean someone who lives in literal proximity to you. If you’ve ever had a dirty thought about any married woman, you’ve broken the commandment.

56

Right. I was just being snide. Anyway, I haven’t done that in a seriously envious/inappropriate way with anyone’s wife…the definition of covet doesn’t seem to cover transient “whoa, check that out” thoughts. Of course, interpretation is key, but I really don’t think they’re talking about thoughtcrime, but more active coveting.

57

I agree that’s an improvement.

58

SSgtBaloo, do you believe your moral compass is derived from the Bible?

If so, how do you feel about the breaking many of the Ten Commandments being legal? How do you feel about the Bible allowing slavery? Females as property?

Or is your general sense of right and wrong sourced from the environment you live in?

59

Semi-related, I once returned from an army detail at 2 a.m. to drop off the vehicle I’d used. The first step was driving to the base gas pumps to top up the tank and there, on the otherwise deserted base, I saw a military police vehicle (the only other moving vehicle in sight) accelerate sharply on one of the long straight roads, apparently engaged in a one-man drag race.

“Okay,” I said to myself. “You’re alone on the base with one M.P. and he’s clearly bored, so make sure to come to a full stop at all intersections, signal all turns, and stay well within the posted limit, because I don’t need to be this guy’s welcome distraction.” Any other time, I’d’ve been much more relaxed. Does this make me immoral? If so… fine, whatever.

60

Wouldn’t pedophile priests be atheists ? If they REALLY thought there is a god who’s gonna punish them for eternity, why would they act out ? The bible had been altered by various popes over the centuries, letters taken out and new ones put in. The dead sea scrolls documents are the earliest church letters ever found…but…they aren’t deemed bible- icious for some reason that the vatican won’t tell. If martians landed in N.Y. city and said they put humans and animals on earth as an experiment…the sunday jimmy- bob preachers and priests would still be asking for donations.