(May 13, 2011 at 7:08 am)Girlysprite Wrote: First of all, religion is not a good source for morals. The reason is that the morals are not clear - they are extremely muddled. You'd think that a thing like ten rules set in stone is clear. However, the killing done by 'the holy people' continues. Just to illustrate the point; Moses came down the mountain with the first set of tablets. The people had started worshipping something else in the meantime. Moses gets angry, smashes the tablets, orders the unholy statues to be grinded, mixed with water, and the water has to be drunk. After that he orders several men to strap on swords and kill people. So mere hours after getting the first tablets (and I'll assume those had the same rules) he already breaks the 'no kill' rule.
'Yeah, but there are exceptions! People cry. Then why isn't there a clear point by point list of what those exceptions are? Some bible statements even contradict each other. You can really see that when two groups condemn each other, both using quotes from the same bible...
This is just an example. Most rules are like that. This leads to many religious people picking the rules and deciding what is good and what is not. As such, the bible is extremely shaky as a source of morals.
Now, many theists seem to wonder why people would bother behaving nice if there was no eternal glory as reward at the end. Many of them predict a tidal wave of terrible behavior as atheism gains popularity. But when we look at reality, this doesn't seem to be the case. Atheists are not 'worse' then religious people are. The reason is that humans are simply evolved to be generally nice. Why do you think that helping others feels good? It is an built-in reward system from our brains. We are evolved as a group species, and group species have to stick together and be nice. We have a 'see it from someone else's view' part in our brains. It works automatically. When you see someone suffer, you feel bad about it too. When you help someone and it makes that person happy, you feel rewarded too. You see a friend cry, you become sad. This impulse is hard to overcome and is very strong.
Interestingly, there are people who have a specific brain-defect so that this system does not work. Children like this do not return any love at all, and often hurt people on purpose. They are physically incapable of caring for others. These people are sad cases, because they can't mesh in with society at all. They can't understand how people feel, and they aren't capable of being nice to other people - seeing their cases you start to realize how deep this system goes, and how automatic it is - our day is littered with offering little pleasantries to each other.
The reason I'm nice to people is that I could not stand to see them hurt and suffering. And that is a good thing, I''m glad that I, and people in general, work like that.
You make two very good points, except that, in the first case, the point is that Moses broke the 'no kill rule' i.e. it's not that there isn't a moral code, it is just that he went against it. You are quite right to claim that religious people can be just as immoral as Atheists. But here is the difference: If you believe in God, it is completely irrational to do something in this transient existence that would put you at risk of being damned for eternity. So why do Christians, as an example, do wrong? The reason is that they have some selfish end that allows them to overide their reasoning faculties. It is the same reason why a vastly overweight person continues to overeat. A short term tiny gain, e.g. eating a bar of chocolate, over a long term huge gain, i.e. a healthy weight and a longer and more fullfilled life. However, the code is still there and the rationale won't go away.
Your second point is a good one but also does not take account of the fact that people can easily, and often do, overide these evolutionary sensations to obtain some selfish end. Just look at the history of Humankind. Even as we speak, we, in this advanced western civilisation, are dropping bombs on other human beings to gain some end.
Furthermore, have we really evolved as far as you think? Recall the baying Roman crowds enjoying the sight of Christians being torn to pieces by being thrown to the lions or the crowds that gathered to watch a woman being beheaded in order to satisfy Henry the VIII's short term desires.
I am not as confident as you seem to be that about Human development and that underneath the thin facade of civilised society, there lurks much deeper beastly drives. These drives seem to surface whenever push comes to shove, such as Rwandan genocide or the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.
So my point is that all people have an inherently selfish side to there nature and that this nature can lead them to undertake all sorts of mis-demeanour and even horrific acts. This is true for religious as well as atheist people. But that, because religious people have a God, then these acts (from their perspective) are irrational and these people, deep down, know it ( maybe this is the source of so called conscience). For an atheist, given history so far, relying on the evolution of some sort of higher-man seems a long way off. It is doubtful that commiting a mis-demeanor to enhance one's own existence is irrational under the atheist scheme.
