You pretty much nailed it. I was discussing a possible consequence of atheism. If you must know, the question I was exploring myself was the notion of moral pedagogy as provided by religion. Most people here seem to be arguing that they came to their morals by reasoned analysis, which I tend to doubt. Most of us came by our behavior in Kindergarten. We were taught hte basic social mores, and have only refined them as we got older. Most of our morals are based off of a principal of noncoercion.
One of the issues here, is the extremely offensive, “You’re a sociopath if you need authority to be moral.”, argument, but of course we let it slide, because we as theists are expected to be more tolerant than atheists. Any number of insults about hte magical sky pixie, flying spaghetti monster, or invisible pink unicorn are par for the course. We are expected to justify the inquisition, or Islamic fundamentalism, as those sorts of religious expressions are the default, and we are practicing some sort of anomaly if we behave in a way that is more kind and tolerant than that. Even though the entire new testament is basically a message telling you to be kind to people, we are expected to defend against private piques and prejudices regularly. Now, of course, turn around and make one thread about a possible outcome of the loss of faith, in order to illustrate the role that religion plays in some people’s lives and people scream bloody murder as though you are about to institute a pogrom. Though, I can count multiple times I have seen atheist pile-ons in the last week alone, and I cannot remember the last time I saw a religious pile-on here at this forum.
No one came by their morals rationally. You weren’t born with a copy of “The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.”, in your hand. You were instructed by trial and error by adults whose fundamental morality had changed very little from the previous generations. Every once in a while, a big philosophical movement comes along that changes the culture and it’s mores in a significant way. We saw this in the 60s as well as during the Enlightenment. Both had massive repercussions, violent social upheaval across the board. As Pochacco so eloquently illustrated, one does not come by their morals individually, they come by their morals based upon what society expects of them. The current culture’s morals are based on widespread agreement. As I pointed out in regards to the 60s and the enlightenment, that widespread agreement does not change particularly often. You learned to behave in social situations through years of carrot and stick politicking on the part of your parents and school teachers.
So besides being offensive, arguing that gaining morals from authority is in any way dishonorable, is just plain wrong. We are all subject to the authority that binds us together whether that be religion, kinship groups, or the state. We all come by our morals from some sort of higher authority. It is solipsistic to believe otherwise. Any sort of moral learning that we achieve later in life merely builds upon the imprinting and conditioning of early childhood. Sometimes on rare occasions we come to a paradigm shifting event that gives us the opportunity to take stock of just what we believe. This is what I was describing here. I wasn’t saying that all atheists are sociopaths, I was just taking atheism to a total extreme, where it nullifies everything that one thought previously to be true. For the theist, God is the absolute truth. If you lose the absolute truth, what trust may you put in the lesser truths? This isn’t a reflection upon all atheists at all, it is a reflection upon how significant an event loss of faith really is. Now, likely most people don’t just up and lose their faith one day, it probably trickles out to a point where they wonder if they ever really had it in the first place, or in some cases they just pretended to have it so they could fit in with the crowd, and then one day decide it’s no longer relevant, and they don’t care what comes by it. However, for people with strong faith, it isn’t simply a crutch to lean on, it is a strong and palpable force in their lives informing upon every decision. The issue at hand here is that atheists quite often do not have any toleration of faith at all, it’s just politically correct make-nice words. The very idea that it is a ‘mere crutch’, is a dismissal that it possibly has any validity at all. It isn’t a valid part of someone’s life, it’s a binky for the stupid and the weak, therefore if someone illustrates a scenario where someone has their life turned inside out by the loss of faith, then they must be trolling.
