Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Cyberman]

I think most of the people here have argued that morality is subjective and has its origins with individual thinking and evolutionary predispositions. This isn't the result I expected with my OP. I believed most atheists felt that there are overriding moral principles that could be called objective.

I could grant that there are sets of moral principles which, by virtue of being external to myself, can be considered objective. They're called the law and society as a whole. All your questions seem to be missing this "social" element. Would you like someone to smack you in the mouth for no reason other than they felt like it? I'm guessing not, because you know it would hurt, cause you distress and harm, and would generally be not a very pleasant experience. Thus, you don't want to do the same to someone else. You know they wouldn't like it. I'm not saying a smack in the mouth isn't justified occasionally, just that people don't go around doing harm to each other just because they can. That's where the mores of society come in, a desire to belong. Conversely, we tend to lock up people who do cause us harm, either on a personal level or a societal one. That's where laws come in, if you hadn't already guessed.

It's not just a case of "if it feels good, do it" simply because you can. Neither do you need an incredibly morally-questionable rulebook to tell you what not to do. I've said it before, but even as an atheist, I don't tend to wake up each morning and have to be told not to go out robbing and killing and raping, however much enjoyment I may get from those things (if I was an anti-social jerk or a priest or something).

If our morality is in a large part defined by evolution, how can we trust ourselves to make a subjective moral judgement. Isn't moral judgement then just the reflexive neural response of an electromechanical ape-like meat machine?

No more than a violin concerto is the sound of horse hair scraping across 'cat gut'*. In the end, every animal function comes down to neurological responses, just as everything in the Universe, from sunsets to supernovae, come down to interactions between sub-sub-atomic particles and whatever lies beyond. Merely reducing something to its fundamental elements takes nothing away from what it actually is.

Besides which, and I feel I'm leaving myself open to a kicking for this by someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about, morality isn't in a large part defined by evolution; except insofar as we've evolved to be a species of social animal.

How can anyone claim the right to pass judgement on anyone else, since all morality would seem to have an equal footing?

Are you aware that in some societies, it is considered morally acceptable to eat dead relatives as a way of honouring them and their memory? That in some societies, it is considered morally acceptable for children to marry and start producing children as soon as they are physically capable of doing so, meaning that, in many cases, children as young as ten are having sex and getting pregnant? That in some societies it is considered morally acceptable to mutilate the genitals of babies, not only slicing off boys' foreskins but also girls' clitorises and labia as well, often resulting in severe trauma and even death? Those are just the tip (if you'll pardon the unintentional pun) of a very large moral relativity iceberg.

Clearly not many of those things would be acceptable in our 'enlightened' society; so, equally clearly, all morality does not seem to have an equal footing.

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(* Yes, I know that the 'catgut violin strings' thing is an urban myth. I just didn't want to pedant a pithy phrase to death.)