RE: Replacing Religious Morality
November 12, 2013 at 7:12 pm
(This post was last modified: November 12, 2013 at 7:13 pm by mralstoner.)
Charles Darwin: "A man who has no ... belief in the existence of a personal God ... can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts."
So yeah atheists (like other animals) only have our desires/feelings to tell us good from bad, right from wrong. Ethics is thus a matter of competing emotional desires (within yourself and with others). How we resolve those competing desires is what humans have been arguing about since the dawn of time. All your questions are valid but after a while you'll probably forget about them and just get on with "being nice". It works most of the time.
Paul Kurtz is not a bad place to start for humanist/atheist philosophy, he's written books like Exuberant Skepticism i.e. he puts the passion back into humanism (without abandoning rational skepticism).
So yeah atheists (like other animals) only have our desires/feelings to tell us good from bad, right from wrong. Ethics is thus a matter of competing emotional desires (within yourself and with others). How we resolve those competing desires is what humans have been arguing about since the dawn of time. All your questions are valid but after a while you'll probably forget about them and just get on with "being nice". It works most of the time.
Paul Kurtz is not a bad place to start for humanist/atheist philosophy, he's written books like Exuberant Skepticism i.e. he puts the passion back into humanism (without abandoning rational skepticism).
