Morality without God

[The Grand Nudger]

That may be, but if I remember correctly, the topic of this thread is how the average atheist should respond.  We're not interested in what Jains do.

Well, the many disagreements in this thread betray the notion that the average atheist™ should or does have any particular moral opinion or justification in the first place.  That's part of what makes this line of nonsense so silly.  It's not as if the faithful aren't aware that atheists can justify their moral statements without referencing a god, and in many different ways.  They do it all day every day too.

I don't know if the average atheist would hold to the type of moral system described, but a great many westerners do whether they're atheists or not.  Killing, even in self defense, is suspect.  Should have stayed out of the situation.  Should have diffused the situation.  Should have run.  Should have hid.  Should have called for help.  At the end of all of it, nothing about your actions prevented the bad thing from happening, and you were definitely involved in making it happen.  A person was still killed, we just shuffled the actors around.

Thoughts like that (and that thought, exactly) form the basis of some ideas about civility and the necessity (moral imperative, even) of creating a society that massively privileges every outcome other than one person killing another.  That deeply scrutinizes every killing.  There are plenty of ways to construct a moral system so that one instance of doing x is bad and another instance of x is good, and that's fine....but there's no real need to do so, and that's fine too.