(March 10, 2015 at 12:36 pm)SteveII Wrote:(March 10, 2015 at 12:28 pm)Alex K Wrote: There is no lie.
It's only a lie if you deny how you obtained your ethics.
An how does an atheist obtain ethics?
Mostly the same way as you, without tacking on 'because God said so' on top of it.
Human beings have inherent moral sentiments, like instincts for reciprocity and fairness. Thousands of years of trying a wide variety of social experiments have selected for cultures more successful in managing human cooperation. Every modern culture, including those with no roots in Abrahamic religion, teaches its children not to murder, rob, rape, or pillage; to the point that in most developed regions, it takes local societal breakdown or special training to get young men to kill each other en masse. We get our ethics from our parents, our peers, and our society in general. We may use moral reasoning to improve on those mores, but no one starts from scratch unless they were raised horribly.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.