Where are the Morals?

[robvalue]

Did I just read the phrase, "rapist is atheist"?

I think atheism may be the most misunderstood concept in today's world. Atheism certainly doesn't achieve any of these arbitrary goals, since it makes no attempt to.

However, generally atheism is more likely to lead to personal accountability, so if you rape someone, you have to live with it. You don't get a free pass thanks to sucking up to someone, and not the person you raped, later.

Holy books are a bunch of crap as far as morals are concerned. The bible for example is just one long story of atrocity, and we have had to make secular laws to stop people doing most of it. Do you think we were wrong to do so? Should we still be stoning people to death for gathering sticks on Sunday? If something is moral because someone says its moral and you just follow blindly, you have no morals at all. You are just being obedient to someone who may or may not actually be moral.

Morals = empathy + reason

If something is moral and happens to be in some old book, then it's not moral because it's in some old book. You could write a book about morals, and it could be wonderfully accurate as far as possible, without it having anything to do with gods or mythology.

I have heard many times that people think if they gave up religion they would just go around murdering and raping. This is the result of brainwashing. People are more moral than the religions they follow preach (at least most people are) because they apply their own morality to it to pick and choose what is and isn't right. There may be a few severely mentally unstable people for which the idea of accountability to god is the only thing keeping them from pillaging, but I would be fairly certain this is a tiny minority of people with such fears.

As children, we need a level of guidance because we don't yet have the full mental capacity to make good decisions. But once you are an adult, you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

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Wow, OK I just can't let this go. Barbarians and creative writers 2000 years ago know stuff about morality that we don't?

Also, religion teaches morality in a very black and white way. This good, that bad. Don't do that, I'll stick a spike in you if you do. Real life is in the grey area, and such bold statements can only act as a very rough guide. And generally not a good one. Did you know "thou shalt not kill" isn't even in the ten commandments? I know most people think it is, but it isn't. Are they all gonna start killing each other now they know this? (It made god's first draft of over 200 commandments, but he decided to leave it out for the final draft onto the tablets to make more room for his ego and stuff about boiling goats in milk. Oh, and stealing didn't make it either.)

So... really? Not so long ago gay people were illegal because of religion.