Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Boccaccio]

I have moral objectives related to staying alive and breeding and taking pleasure in the exercise of my senses and abilities and, remarkably enough, these objectives prove best satisfied by treating other people well rather than by casual murder or abuse. The theist notion that radiating circles of interest lead inexorably to mutual destruction is just plain silly really. Does that really need to be discussed?

My strategies include those I mentioned in that earlier post. You can toss a bit of Kant into the following although I am not trying to be rigorous here.
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If you can identify that then you can measure the success of strategies toward those objectives using principles of utility and consequences, for example.

While noble objectives, I don't see any objective prescription of what you "ought" to do other than what is only self-identified, making your values and duties arbitrary.

Your "ought" appears to be power-based alone.
Saying "only self-identified" and "arbitrary" appears to me to be undertaking significant effort on your part to miss the point, although I see that DP is having similar problems bringing you to understand much the same point.

Given objectives, as a very simple case "the survival of a social species largely unable to fend for itself other than by using its brain co-operatively", success of behaviours can be measured. If, within that learning, I adopt "only self-identified" and "arbitrary" behaviours, especially those demonstrably unsuccessful, I will soon find myself in great pain and most probably out of the breeding pool.

No individual entity has to tell me what I ought to do if I have evolved, can perceive, and can learn culturally, what are successful behaviours. Is that really so hard a point?

Someone may see things differently than you- are they wrong?

Which of us is wrong is measurable in accord with the moral objectives.

Couldn't a case be made that foricble copulation is a 'good' method of staying alive, breeding, and taking pleasure in the exercise with regards to one's survival?

Demonstrably, this is not a successful strategy for humans. Why do you ignore this fact?

Especially if it produces a citizen of the world who makes significant beneficial contributions- something that could and would certainly be a measured success. Is the preservation of one woman's liberty worth precluding a benefit of the world? Your view doesn't suggest it is.

Oh dear, you are right of course. I will get out there and start raping on the off-chance I may conceive a beneficial citizen.
What a pity that the behaviour entailed will ensure that the person conceived is unlikely to have any chance to progress beyond the social norms of stone-age hunter-gatherers.

It is (supposedly) divine-command morality which faces exactly the problem of likely damaging behaviours. Human group morality gradually learns to avoid these problems.

(I have taken an example of objective morality to another post).

In the meantime I will further my own: Indeed, my moral judgement is stripped of me- judgment is reserved to that which is a more knowledgable, more powerful, more loving, universe-creating, eternal being. Being a fallible and imperfect human I am (end everyone I posit), better the world is for having such an authority rule over mine. Which in part answers your following question(s):

If [you obtain your morality from] the bible, how do you determine what is true or literal, symbolic or false, or human error in the transcription?

If [from] godly commands, by what means do you receive them?

As I have stated, my morals are based on God’s revelation in Scripture. I have good reason to believe that Scripture is a revelation from God, that God’s commands to us supply our moral duties.

You select and reinterpret scripture on which to base your ideas of morality, and you assume your perfect god changes his mind, or else you would still be behaving in accord with Leviticus and still promoting slavery. Further, you can not offer any means on which you make one reinterpretation or another, other than to say that whatever happens it is your fault and your god remains perfect.

Moral duties are rooted in the divine commands; values are rooted in God’s nature, therefore objective because they are rooted in God’s commands and nature.

I recognise that you take the second horn of Euthyphro, that it is good because your god loves it. Incidentally, does your god control his own nature?

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Are you really saying, Stephen, that the determinant of whether something is objectively moral depends on it being dependent on something which is independent of you?

Yes.

If so, I can provide you with a perfectly objective morality, not dependent on any mind beyond that you have agreed to follow the rules emerging. To say the only objective morality comes from a deity is false. To say morality comes from a deity serves only the purpose of absolute followership, like any dictatorship, and strips your moral judgement from you leaving you only to follow orders.

You could be right! I await your case.

Stephenmills1000 has agreed that the determinant of whether something is objectively morali is that it is dependent on something which is independent of him. He has also agreed that such a morality must not depend on any mind beyond that he has agreed to follow the rules emerging. Very well, on those terms I give you objective moralty, as follows:

1. All preceding moral decisions are binding and may not be re-asked.
2. All moral questions are framed for a yes or no answer.
3. All of the these questions are answered by the high flip of a fair coin, heads for no and tails for yes.

Anything wrong with that, Stephen? Do you think, perhaps, it might not actually produce moral results? I submit that it will because the fair coin has goodness as its nature. Can you show otherwise?

Any questions?

The main difference in your notion of objective morality is that preceding decisions are not binding, your god changing his mind exactly when you do, as you can read in the paper in my third link here.

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God would be an unemobodied mind or consciousness. It has no "parts" or "pieces," so you wouldn't get any more simple than that I presume. This does not preclude God's thoughts and ideas- the functions of the mind- from being complex themselves.

From time to time I forget about this quaint notion of theists about disembodied minds.

Stephen, can you point me to reliable instances of a functional mind without a functioning brain?

If not, why do you make this shit up?

Thanks.

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The fact is there is no metric in existence that can tell us if we're doing a 'better' job or not, objectively.

It is trivial to define this objectively. You object only because you want the angels of the lord to flutter down to tell you instead.

In fact, thanks to the advent of technology, I'm sure we can marshal such statistical evidence that you have placed such a premium on, and find that if anything we've become more efficient at killing people in the last 2 centuries, citing the enormous body counts of several regimes during this period.

Please go to your library and take out "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Pinker. It is not about religion but about the steady decline in violence in our societies and inferential reasons for that.

It is interesting that despite our vastly more efficient methods of killing people, we are less likely to die a violent death than ever before in history. This, incidentally, coincides with gradually increasing atheism and is evident in the most secular societies. I do not claim atheism is the reason (see Pinker for reasons) but I note that the result is precisely contrary to the fervid beliefs of religious people.