Where do atheists get their morality from?

[genkaus]

Yours is not a rational position, it is a semantic one. A rational position is one where one considers the proposition "A God doesn't exist", and accordingly all the rational consequences of the position, be they epistemic, ethical, skeptical, whatever.

Your position is not rational, it's strictly semantic. Or definitional. "Atheism means no belief in God and that's that!" It's a convenient position to hold, burden-of-proof-wise. But flip the situation and consider the theist: "I'm a Christian theist. All I believe is that Jesus is God. Don't tell me about any problems in my worldview. I don't care nor am I interested. I'm a Christian and that's that." If a Christian said that, you wouldn't smile and nod and neither would I.

So when you say something of the sort, I bring my paddle out to give you a right spanking too.

A rational consideration of atheism takes into account not only the propositional truth of atheism, but also the outcomes that such a belief has on other, related beliefs. There is no other way to go about it. We're not debating dictionary definitions, we are debating worldviews. And atheism, being a position on the existence of God, is a worldview. And rational atheism, taking into consideration the worldview that is derived from it, has a serious moral problem.

And if you don't like rape, murder and child abuse, you should be concerned that atheism allows for the legitimization of these crimes. Sam Harris was concerned enough. Dawkins himself now feels the same way. So why are you trying to escape the problem by playing word-games?

The mistake you make is assuming that every part of a person's worldview is derived from his atheism, i.e., the proposition that god doesn't exist. The only rational epistemic or ethical consequences of that would be "god doesn't give any knowledge" and "god doesn't provide any morals". Atheism itself is usually a consequence of some other worldview which would entail its own morality which need not be connected to atheism at all.

Your error is to putting all the atheists in the same categorical worldview and assuming that since their worldview derives from their atheism (and not vice-versa), the same moral problems apply to all of them. I guess this is the result of theistic worldview often being derived in its entirety form the existence of god and you being incapable of imagining anything different for atheists.

The correct answer would be that atheism doesn't say shit about rape, murder or child-abuse being right or wrong. That doesn't mean the world view that atheist subscribes to doesn't have its own rules regarding it.