Atheism and morality

[Mystical]

Talk about instincts all you want. Jack doesn't care. He wants to disembowel a prostitute and he has nothing to lose. What reason does HE have to not disembowel a prostitute if there is no god and an afterlife?

Personal abhorrence?

Unfortunately there are people that are born with no conscience. We lock up those people when they harm others.

I agree with Rahul. Personal abhorrence. Why? Because experiences directly affect your body. They've measured karma in the works.

I read an article a few years back about a new field of genetic science called epigenetics. Simply put, epigenetics is the genetics of genetics. It regulates what genetic switch goes on or off.
This experiment involved cloned mice. After cloning them, the mice had the exact identical epigenome. One was put in a cage with a maternal mother, one with a neglectful mother. That was the Only difference in the mice experiences: Experience. After some time they tested the mice which had totally different epigenomes, and the mouse with the mother who was neglectful had all sorts of illness markers and physical symptoms. For one it was predisposed to high blood pressure and anxiety. What fascinates me about the implications of this is that experience alters your body. When they switched the mothers with the baby mice: the factors resolved or deteriorated.

The quality of parental care has a broad impact on mental health, including the risk for psychopathology [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Studies in the rat directly link the maternal care environment to long-term effects on neural systems that regulate stress [6], [7] emotional function[8], [9], learning and memory [10], [11], [12] and neuroplasticity [10], [13], [14], [15]. Naturally occurring variations in maternal care in the first week of life in rats are associated with changes in brain and behavior that persist until adulthood [16]. These effects are reversed by cross-fostering, [7], [9] demonstrating a causal link between maternal care and gene expression programming.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/...ndGenomics+