Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Polaris]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...081347.htm

http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/...sosis5.pdf

And no. You only think you have dismissed them, but they are still at the core of the evolution of human society and culture.

Ah, the famous python carving.

OK. Firstly, a carving does not a religion make. There is a time-old tradition with archaeologists whereby, if they don't know what something is for, they label it as religious/ceremonial. Which isn't the same thing as knowledge. Imagine your own home (take a look around) and how everything might be imagined by an archaeologist who had little knowledge of our time. Objects which might have some artistic merit to you, might be imagined as ceremonial to a future person who can't come up with another answer.

Secondly, even if religion is in place... that isn't the same thing as religious morality. As recently as the Ancient Greeks, they had religious figures and gods which were celebrated and sacrificed to... but there were no accompanying religious tracts which insisted on anything remotely resembling ethics.

All of this post-dated (by a long way) secular morality. Later religions borrowed from it.

edit: and to intrude on any other counter-points... all social animals use morality. You can be all snobbish about it, and claim that it is crude, but their morality doesn't need to be as complex as ours. It still exists. Chimpanzees have a system of morality which interweaves with familial hierarchy. They don't have religion. Expand that to the earliest humans... and then try to repeat the claim that religion predated secular morality.

Did you check the second link? It is widely accepted amongst anthropologists that the Neanderthals showed a particular reverence for their ancestors. This is considered by most to be the beginnings of religion within humanity.

Yeah. I don't see chimps setting up cemeteries for their dead adorned with decorations to worship their ancestors (not like the later ancestor worship religions though, this were those religions in the most primitive form).