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<p>There doesn’t have to be a good and there doesn’t have to be a bad. But an atheistic moral code would assign genocide to either good or bad, based on human interpretation. </p>
<p>The antithesis to spiritual morality is nihilism, not atheistic morality.</p>
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<p>Yes. I agree. Although you assume that there is no authority beyond our own opinion, and that’s really the only reason why you believe this. </p>
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<p>Right. Science is not based on a stronger foundation. It’s foundation, however, strongly meshes with experimental observation. Which is why no one should be surprised that the religiously devout often question experimentation while the scientific community vehemently supports (proper) experimentation. It’s simply their biases.</p>
<p>You don’t doubt your senses when your senses agree with your assumptions. You only doubt your senses when they disagree with your assumptions.</p>
<p>Nothing brings the mind to its knees; certainly not the body and senses it controls.</p>
<p>The Bible isn’t supposed to be taken as a historical account, and interpretations of the Bible largely differ. Some people just tend to use the Bible as justification for their actions, so it’s not the Bible that is wrong, but more so the people who manipulated the text.
And science and religion can definitely coexist.</p>
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<p>You are correct in that there doesn’t “have” to be. But the atheistic moral code doesn’t answer the question of moral obligation – i.e., there’s no specific reason to do anything, like genocide (or not to do it). It may set back the human race, and humans might assign a label, but it’s a neutral event in the moral sense.</p>
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<p>Yes.</p>
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<p>But spiritual morality is just a consequence of other beliefs. The question isn’t whether it’s valid, it’s whether the basis is true.</p>
<p>Atheistic morality on the other hand would have to be a belief by itself. And it still would have to rely on some idea of transcendent right and wrong. To me that idea seems inherently spiritual, though not necessarily reliant on belief in God (Buddhism for example).</p>
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<p>I agree that atheistic morality is not a necessary byproduct of atheism, while spiritual morality is a necessary byproduct of certain faiths. </p>
<p>The question wasn’t whether all atheists follow a moral code. The question was whether atheism prevents morality. Why can’t an atheist have a standalone trust in the cultural, societal, or individual moral codes that stem from natural human thoughts?</p>
<p>You’re trying to define morality as an exclusive byproduct of faith, and then telling me that atheistic morality doesn’t follow this definition. That’s pointless. Define a moral code as a set of wrongs and rights that a human abides by–as seen in normative ethics. Using this definition, disprove that atheists can abide by a moral code. You can’t. You just want to create your own definition.</p>
<p>What is the argument here? That atheistic morality requires 2 assumptions (there are no gods, human perception is an acceptable basis for morality) while spiritual morality requires 1 assumption (there is a God)? There is an implied second assumption in spiritual morality, too (faith is an acceptable basis for morality), but even if there wasn’t: Why is one assumption better than two?</p>
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<p>As defined by a human. Or multiple humans. “Transcendent” is a misnomer here.</p>
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<p>Because if morality is just a thing that stems from natural reactions in human brains, then it is no more valid than immorality, which also (according to this belief) stems from natural reactions in human brains.</p>
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<p>So what makes one human’s assignment of genocide to “bad” more valid than another’s assignment of it to “good”?</p>
<p>Unless there is a higher standard which does not stem from humans against which human ideas can be judged.</p>
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<p>Do atheists lack souls such that they would live their lives for personal gain, “public be damned”, since they do not have a higher power to keep them in line? I should certainly hope not!</p>
<p>^ I suspect that virtually all atheists actually believe in an overarching standard of value, even if they deny it.</p>
<p>I am not atheist or agnostic, and neither do I follow a single established religion, so I may be biased here, but I think that human beings are amazing creatures, and that most of us have a moral code already within ourselves that makes it uncomfortable for us to breech it, and it seems fairly clear to me that we didn’t decide what was good and what was evil based on empirical studies. For anyone to posit that morality either requires a god or is a sham if a god does not exist seems dehumanizing. We are not machines yet.</p>
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<p>Like I said, atheism does not inherently require morality. Thus, an atheist should agree that other atheists might consider genocide to be “good” because they are immoral.</p>
<p>However, for a given atheist, genocide can be “bad” because he or she abides by a moral code. Thus, from the perspective of atheist morality, genocide is “bad”–others that say genocide is “good” are immoral and incorrect. </p>
<p>Why? Because I think so, and thus I say so. I, not a god, have absolute authority over morality in my version of atheist morality. (Alternatively, it could be a different human or natural phenomena who/which has absolute authority over morality). I concede that other atheists may believe genocide is good. They are wrong. I am the basis of my morality, and I am obligated to myself.</p>
<p>^Thus, it seems that the consequences of being immoral in a hypothetical purely nonreligious/atheistic society would be decided based upon the dominant morality in said society. I see no problem with this, really. It is not so different in effect from a “spiritual” morality.</p>
<p>(I will respond to Adenine later when I have more time)</p>
<p>^^ But is not genoicide a despicable act worthy of punishment? Yet if they were simply following their morality, how are their actions more worthy of punishment that your actions which are according to your morality?</p>
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<p>According to those who reject any form of supernaturalism, we are.</p>
<p>@Adenine: David Hume didn’t debunk anything. He simply relegated a study of ethics to scientific reductionism, and in effect destroyed ethics as a field of study. That is, if anyone had listened to him (other than current secular humanists).
Kant later famously <em>debunked</em> Hume and stated that a God (or some divine being) IS necessary for a moral code. No need to bully people around saying this or that philosopher exposed God as a fraud ages ago. It isn’t true.</p>
<p>The point is that atheists today are a sham of what they once were. Nietzsche believed that God could no longer provide a moral code, but his answer wasn’t “Let’s all be relativisits then.” He, as an intelligent human being, realized morality must be built around something greater than man, something more worthy than man (the major failures of utilitarianism/humanism) and created the concept of the Ubermensch. Schopenhauer, another atheist philosopher, stated that man was innately evil (controlled by the will) and must deny the self to find truth and goodness. He even stated that, since most people will never learn to deny their desires, the most moral thing most people can ever do is die. Very different from current secular humanist fun party built around human happiness for the basic reason that everyone enjoys being happy.</p>
<p>So, to give my own input, morality must be built around a divine being, essence or concept. And all codes of morality innately are. Even relativists build themselves a moral code, with themselves as gods. The problem is when the people ultimately fail to live up to that and relativism collapses on its own precepts. Humanists too have a code, with mankind as the divine being worthy of being served. Unfortunately, humanism and its cousin utilitarianism were both <em>actually</em> debunked in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If the truth makes people unhappy and causes suffering, as it often seems to do, then utilitarianism is a doctrine of ignorance. Truth takes a backseat to human seratonin levels. This whole existentialism thing, it must be remembered, is just this century’s layperson philosophy. Most American teenagers are utilitarians simply because the idea arrived here from our sister country, Britain. Germany has a very different (much richer) philosophical background, and in my experience, people who know of Kant always choose his ideas over Hume’s.</p>
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<p>You’re hitting a good point here. If an exterminator felt his actions were morally righteous, then he would not expect punishment. He would be wrong in my world view, but he would be right in his world view–because morality is an innate, man-made philosophy.</p>
<p>An atheistic morality exists absolutely only within one individual’s perception. Every other individual could theoretically have a different absolute morality, and theirs shouldn’t be any less right because it is also created from physically natural phenomenon (i.e. synaptic firing in the brain). </p>
<p>Fortunately, we don’t live in anarchy and not all people’s thoughts are unique. People with similar moralities form cohesive cultures and societies with an established moral code. This reduces the number of unique moral codes and helps law govern morality.</p>
<p>Still, you might say that this implies that atheistic morality isn’t absolute, because different societies abide by different moral codes. **But it’s an absolute code to the individual–and that’s all that morality can really be. ** I believe genocide is wrong. Thus, any exterminator is immoral; his own moral code is not relevant. Not because I am a God or in any way better than him, but because atheistic morality is an individual characteristic while spiritual morality is an overarching human characteristic. </p>
<p>As I change, my absolute atheistic morality changes. My absolute atheistic morality can be different than all other absolute atheistic moralities. This isn’t contradictory.</p>
<p>Spiritual morality assumes morality is like a class variable. Everyone abides by the same moral code. Atheistic morality is like an instance variable. Every individual has a moral code. Every individual who has a moral code expects others to follow it–if they don’t, he would consider them immoral. It is chaotic and potentially sets the path for anarchy, which is why we clump many individual moralities into philosophical doctrines, and have society’s majority (or “elite”) pick their morality to define the law.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that spiritual morality is also forcing their morality on those around them. They assume there is an overarching morality, and thus individuals who don’t follow such morality are immoral. From my perspective (as an atheist moralist) this “overarching morality” is a collection of people sharing similar individual moralities and applying their individual moralities on society. Thus, religion is a philosophical doctrine formed by a collection of individuals sharing common moral codes.</p>
<p>^ But if your morality is merely an individual trait, how can you justify taking action against those who act according to their own moralities? To become angry at an immoral act implies that you feel that the person “should” have acted otherwise. Is not their claim that you “should” have joined in their genocide equally valid by this belief?</p>
<p>Secondly, if overall morality is merely a collection of individual moralities, then would genocide be morally right if a majority of people supported it?</p>
<p>To cite the most obvious example:</p>
<p>Since most people in the 1700s believed that Black people were inferior to Whites and that it was morally right to enslave them, was that a morally right thing for them to do?</p>
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<p>No, you missed the point: absolute morality changes with an individual. I am a different individual than those that lived in the 1700s. Only my morality is absolute in my human perception. Thus, slavery is wrong, and it always was–until I either change my morality or die. </p>
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<p>Spiritual moralists do the same thing. You have an individual morality (from my perspective), and you use this morality to define how everyone should act. I have my own individual morality, and it is not based on an assumption of a Higher Being. Still, under my moral code, genocide is wrong. If I lived in a society where genocide was morally righteous, I would have to either change my morality (thus creating a new perception of absolute morality) or leave society. </p>
<p>A man who believes that genocide is morally righteous must leave society at this point in time, because society does not accept his philosophy.</p>
<p>There is a reason that the greatest ideas and the most immoral acts usually come from those that conflict with societal norms. They both have unique philosophies, and they both need to be banished from society in order to preserve calm. It’s an unfortunate flaw in human morality that we can’t distinguish bad morality from a new,
“better” morality (it will only be better once it is incorporated into societal morality). Neither the bad man nor the innovative man can be allowed to act on his or her philosophy, because it is still not accepted in society.</p>
<p>Notice that without society, we would have moral anarchy. So you can’t simply dismember society, either.</p>
<p>You’re pointing out unfortunate effects of man-made morality. You aren’t showing that atheists conflict with morality. </p>
<p>We can’t allow everyone to act on their absolute moral codes. It’s irrelevant whether a societal morality or a spiritual morality is used to guide individual morality. Either way, you slow down progress for the sake of preventing catastrophe.</p>
<p>But notice that this “progress” is simply society helping laymen mold their individual morality. Morality is not outside an individual and it is not everlasting. It lives and dies with man. Society, religion, or other organizations control the masses’ individual moralities. “Progress” is simply a change in society’s or religion’s “moral code” (a set of rules that it expects individual moralities to adapt) that molds individual moralities into a more cohesive and functional philosophy. </p>
<p>The ultimate goal of such philosophy is really to mimic a Higher Authority. Society’s moral code would be so complete that all humans would abide by it willingly. At this point, no further progress is necessary (until the next batch of neurological firings create a new moral code within an individual), and morality has achieved the aims that spiritual morality pretends to have artificially created.</p>
<p>The ideals of religion, IMO, are very good.</p>