If I am not for myself, who is for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
The problem with the Golden Rule is that people are weird and sometimes like weird things to be done to them. Wouldn’t it be better stated as “do unto others how they would like to be done unto”? Or, “don’t do unto others how they don’t like to be done” or something?
It’s weird that rape isn’t in many of the lists above. I guess it’s “theft” of some sort? That sounds terrible and minimizes the horror. Anyway, any universal moral code should definitely prohibit rape and sexual assault.
Well, that pretty much falls under the Golden Rule. The generalized notion that you shouldn’t harm others encompasses rape, and pretty much any other personal injury crime.
We could probably reduce the problem of “moral absolutes” causing problems by just appending “…unless the situation warrants it” to most of our “commandments”.
“Thou shalt not kill…unless the situation warrants it. See Bob over there about to blow up a community center? Yeah, totally kill him.”
A universal prohibition on coercion covers it, too.
You want me to throw away the original ten commandments and give you something you, yet you give as an example a commandment derived from the sixth commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. I did give examples of “moral absolutes” from the original ten, because these illustrate my point about moral absolutes well, but they are just examples and attempts to make up new “moral commandments” would run the risk of being the same kind of moral absolutes. This was my original point and I think I stated so clearly in my last full paragraph above. Perhaps you should have plowed through my whole post before commenting.
I actually completed it around 1997.
Here is a list from Wikipedia. It includes alternate 10 commandments from Dawkins, Hitchens, and Bertrand Russel. Most of them are fairly good guides to decent behavior.
The Islamic tenet is that Islam is the original religion and that other faiths were successors which somehow managed to change the original religion.
“Atheist 10 commandments” may make sense to the Christian turned Atheist, but it sounds too simplistic to me as a Hindus atheist.
The Rig Veda written around 1500 BCE contains some of the key atheist concepts that I have found interesting. Most Indian origin scriptures contain Theist and Atheist approaches at the same time, so there is no one text for atheists.
The Mimasa written in the 7th century may have the equivalent of 10 commandments for Atheists, since part of it deals with living life within the boundaries of “law”; with emphasis on “social duties”. The Mimasas are not very popular amongst most Hindu schools of Philosophy but they are thought to have inspired the foundations of Buddhism.
Good observation. I am not a Christian turned atheist but I swim in a Christian sea so my perspective is colored by that.
I was thinking myself that atheists have even less a central governing body than Baptists do, and look how diverse they are.