Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

But you're still not getting it right on reciprocity. Because it's easy to talk about where reciprocal moral norms work, and the people it protects: conscious, self-aware moral agents.

See... I threw the word "reciprocity" at you, hoping that you'd understand what I meant. Instead, you seemed to have fallen back on an established understanding in your own mind.

Take the word reciprocity... and now allow for the fact that we're social animals. It isn't a one-on-one relationship between two moral agents. It is a societal relationship. No man is an island; each moral agent has interests above and beyond their own self. I won't murder your child/granny/partner if you don't murder mine.

My main objection with your claim is that, somehow, atheists have this huge problem (the lack of objective morality) that we should be seriously concerned about. Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for 100,000 - 250,000 years (give or take, based on whichever expert you're relying on). Religion has been around for... how long? A fraction of that time.

Prior to religion, a whole lot of atheists managed perfectly well in the absence of objective morality. As social animals, morality evolved with us (and our predecessors, far back into other species of human).

When the big bang happened, "right" and "wrong" weren't created. What is "right" and what is "wrong" is a developmental process of social animals. And, as societies change, the concept of "right" and "wrong" also changes. Things that we deem immoral were far from it in antiquity.

This isn't a problem. This is evolution.

So this is the precise causal mechanism that led to the evolution of ethics? Really?

You're making up fantastic evolutionary fairytales to make yourself feel good about the basis of morality. How is this any better than the Hindus, who say the universe is sitting atop a giant turtle?

And who are these fantastic atheists who managed perfectly well in the absence of objective morality? Granted, they probably managed to survive and reproduce with vary levels of effectiveness, but since when is this perfectly well? Is the rape of Nanking an example of "perfectly well" management in the absence of objective morality?

In fact I'll hazard a guess that any evolutionary/sociological/psychological theory you make up to justify the effectiveness of subjective moral values, I can invent a similar BS theory to prove its ineffectiveness. You wanna play this My Little Pony fantasy morality game with me? Really?

Face it, subjective morality is unjustifiable for anybody- theist, atheist, agnostic, deist, pantheist, whatever.

IT JUST. DOESN'T. WORK.