The title of the thread is not “your atheist 10 commandments”, the title is “the atheist 10 commandments”.
Conversation between me and my brother. The one who convinced me of the righteousness of gay rights, anti racism, and who was pounding the drum of global warming (as it was called then) thirty years ago. He has been living in Texas since that time.
Brother: [various rants about the Republicans party platform]
Me: But if they keep promising to do away with the “Death Tax” you will keep voting straight R all the way until this personally applies to you.
Brother: Of course. Money is money.
And, as often happens here on the SDMB, some people have been responding to the thread title, others to what the OP actually says.
Anyway, that was brilliant.
Moderator Action
Since this is a continuation of your threadshit, you are hereby topic banned from this thread. Do not post in this thread again.
Thanks!
And while I came up with the text just now, I’ve actually had the concept in mind for decades. I was raised in a religious family, and when I came to the solid realization that it was all nonsense, I also came to the realization that I had literally been taught no morality whatsoever, beyond “because the sky god ordered it”. As a teenager this was somewhat disconcerting, and I floundered a while without guidance before I managed to piece together a logical morality from first principles - with the first principle of course being “me me me”, and building outwards from there. It took me longer than it should’ve, but then again I was a teenager and even smart teenagers are idiots.
Strong Reminder, do not argue moderation in thread!
I concur
Atheism is not an ideology. It is not a moral system. It is merely the practical lack of belief in deities, eventually the positive belief that there are no deities. Therefore, there is no sense in trying to come up with any “Atheist” morality.
Then come up with a morality that is not attributed to what a god wants us to do. It’s a pretty simple question.
If you want a list of rules to live by, this isn’t a bad start:
But then, there’s the practical problem of religious believers insisting that atheists can’t be moral, because we don’t believe in a god. Having an answer for that (a moral system even atheists can agree on, because it’s based on something other than a belief in god) can be valuable.
You could re-frame the question as, “Can we define a minimal level of moral standards that a large majority of humans would agree with, regardless of religious or cultural background?” but I suspect you’d get less engagement.
Someone above mentioned the Golden Rule, and considering how many cultures across the world and across history have had some version of that rule, you could make a strong case that this is a fundamentally human rule of morality.
We likely have the wrong idea of what they mean by “covet”-
It is not wrong to notice the things that belong to our neighbors, nor even to desire to obtain such things for ourselves legitimately. Coveting happens when someone sees the prosperity, achievements, or talents of another, and then resents it, or wants to take it, or wants to punish the successful person. It is the harm to another person, “your neighbor”—not the desire to have something—that is prohibited.
The 6th is actually Thou shalt not murder.
That would pretty much end this board! 
I doubt many atheists believe in magic.
We can try any of these-
"That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.
One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self. In brief, this is dharma. Anything else is succumbing to desire.
Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
As was said :
In this particular case I am not even asking for standards that a majority would actually agree with, just what you think would be a good set of standards that would benefit humanity if there were agreement. I tried for a punchier title but this is really what I’m asking.
Well, see all of the above. There’s a few suggestions I might quibble with, but no fundamental deal breakers.
Coveting isn’t wanting your own separate one of a thing that your neighbour has. It’s wanting the exact one they have, instead of them having it, perhaps specifically believing you deserve to have it more than they do (or that they deserve it less, which isn’t necessarily quite the same - ‘I deserve it more’=‘I’m special’; ‘you deserve it less’=‘you are deficient’).
Arguably this is closely related to a possible motivation to steal (No.8), but there is an equality angle to it when considered this way.
Point taken. But there are several reasons why I would be hesitant to come up with a “universal list of moral principles” to replace the ten commandments. On reflection, I find this problematic for the following reasons:
Firstly, making conveniently concise and explicit systematized lists of moral rules runs the risk of creating “moral absolutes”. Take the example of the Biblical commandment against adultery. Let’s say it’s “bad” to cheat on your spouse. But what if it’s consensual, I.E., the married couple enjoys group sex? Or what if the marriage has broken down and is likely heading toward divorce anyway? Just saying “adultery is bad” begs the question of exceptions, and some people will not think out of the box but will simply overgeneralize the principle. Or take the commandment against bearing false witness against your neighbor. To me that sounds like not accusing someone of doing something they didn’t do (I don’t know if that’s what the author of the commandment meant, but that’s how it looks to me). That’s obviously moral. It’s manifestly immoral to accuse someone falsely of an offense they didn’t commit. However, this commandment tends to be paraphrased in the sense of “thou shalt not lie”. Lying is traditionally presented as something very bad. It is my understanding that traditional Roman Catholic teachings interpret this moral question in the sense that every lie is a sin, including a “little white lie”, and that even for example telling a lie such as “X is not here” to protect a person you are hiding from a potential murderer is somehow bad, though perhaps a “necessary evil” or at least more excusable. I would consider this fetish for the truth to be nonsense. In general, you should tell the truth if there isn’t a good reason not to. But whether lying is good or bad surely depends on the situation. Lying in order to flatter someone to get an advantage is obviously bad, as is lying to commit fraud. But if you lied to save someone’s life from a potential assailant (e.g. a member of the Resistance telling an SS man that there are no Jews in his house whereas he has ten of them in his cellar), I can’t for the life of me see how there would be any evil in that. Not only would I not consider this lie not to be a necessary evil, I would consider it to be a necessary GOOD. Making a short moral principle “Don’t tell falsehoods” would inevitably have to have an “unless” appended to it in order to be truly moral, and then, what are the “unlesses” that you would write afterward? The relative morality or immorality of a falsehood being rather case-specific, it could be hard to make an all-encompassing commandment. In short, my first problem is that morality is not always absolute, but is on a spectrum/case-specific. Having a list of statments of what you should do/not do without appending qualifying statements may result in people having overly rigid ideas of morality.
My second issue concerns the fact that any list would be of necessity incomplete. There are a lot of things that can be said to be moral or immoral. There are many things that the Ten Commandments DON’T list that I would consider more important than some of what they DO list. For example, I think the last commandment is stupid. If “coveting” means “don’t desire something that belongs to another”, then it is basically punishing your emotions - it established a thoughtcrime. If, on the other hand, it means “don’t plot to steal your neighbor’s goods/your neighbor’s spouse”, then it’s redundant, as that is already covered by the commandments against theft and adultery. Here are a few far more useful commandments: Thou shalt not treat people differently on account of race. Thou shalt not, without justifiable cause, assault your neighbor. Thou shalt be reasonable in the expectations you have of your employees. In short, if you make a specific list of “universal moral commandments”, you run the risk of people treating them like a list of items to check off, and then, satisfied that they have fulfilled all these items, not bother to question whether any of their behaviors not on the list are or are not moral.
Last but not least, publishing lists of “someone’s moral commandments for society” can have a tendency to encourage dogmatic thinking about morality. Society’s perceptions of what is moral have evolved over time as people have come to various realizations that have caused them to re-think previous generations’ morality. For example, today most people will agree that treating women as inferior to men is immoral. A typical husband in a progressive Western country will see his wife as a partner and will believe that they owe each other mutual respect. However, there was a time not that long ago when women were considered inferior to men and “respecting” one’s husband (I.E. giving him deferential treatment, as well as submitting to him) was considered a moral duty. Making women equal to men would have been considered as immoral at one time. What is and what isn’t moral is not always evident or uncontroversial, and we should be able to discuss and debate these things and not treat them as dogmas. Moral rules should be up for challenge and debate, or we would still have the same morality as we did in the time of Hammurabi. Again, I provide an example. One of the Bibilical commandments that seems to be popular even among Atheists is the one to honor your father and mother. Horatius in post #8 above lists it as among those he thinks are “actually not a bad basis for running a human society”. Most of the various well-known modern Atheist commentators, from Dawkins onward, have listed it as “one of the nice ones” in their critiques of the Commandments. Yet in my opinion it is one of the worst ones; I directly consider it an immoral rule, for the same reason that I consider the analogous Biblical exhortations for wives to submit to their husbands or slaves to obey their masters to be immoral. In brief, it’s not that I think people should take their parents for granted, that they shouldn’t be kind back to parents who have been kind for them, or that we shouldn’t assist infirm elders, or what have you, but I flatly disagree with the traditional notion that parents are deserving of honor just because they’re your parents. My view of this question is broadly similar to the one mentioned by George Carlin in the link above. Why do we specifically single out parents for “respect”? Shouldn’t everyone respect everyone else? This moral rule is basically doublespeak. “Respecting” parents means giving them deferential treatment, and I vehemently disagree with expecting people to treat their parents as being somehow better than them. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t appreciate good parents and never do anything reciprocal for them, but I feel that a lot of what parents do for their children are out-and-out owed to them, owing to the dependent and vulnerable position that the parent has put the child in by bringing them into the world. Consequently, parents have no right to demand that their children somehow “pay” or “compensate” them for the sacrifices they have made for them. I don’t for example, think that it’s OK to yell at your child but disrespectful to ever raise your voice at your parent if you are upset at their actions toward you. Nor, for instance, do I think that it is any worse to hit your parent than it is to hit your child. You shouldn’t be expected to respect your parents if they don’t respect you. I think this commandment/moral principle has been used to exercise a lot of oppression by older generations over younger ones, and to justify abuse, as well as to indoctrinate people into tolerating narcissistic and abusive behavior from their parents. This is my opinion and I am challenging the principle here in the same way as people a few generations ago challenged the principle of wives being expected to “respect” their husbands. To go back from the specific to the general, moral principles are important, but our perceptions of them should not be written in stone. They should be open for discussion and reconsideration. Any list we came up with would have to be prone to amendment.
So while I won’t categorically tell you not to make up a list, I would be hard-pressed to come up with one myself.
I haven’t plowed through your whole post yet, but you are putting forward the original 10 commandments as examples of problematic absolutes, when I am inviting you to throw those away and give me whatever you want. For example, “Do not kill anyone, unless it is the only way to keep them from killing an innocent person, including you.”
I quite like parts of the Code of Dinotopia, and would base an ethic on two of them:
Give more, take less.
Others first, self last.
Something based on that works for me, with adaptations. I would look at not putting “self last”, but definitely not a “self first” ethic. Similarly, “Give more, take less” could not always be the right thing, sometimes giving can be overwhelming, and sometimes taking can be the right thing more than you give. But they do serve as a good starting basis.