Replacing Religious Morality

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I'm fairly new to atheism, coming from a few decades of Catholicism. I gave up on the belief in God based on an All-loving God and eternal damnation being unable to rationally coexist.

I suspect it's a bit of a backwards way of becoming an atheist. I had been of the CS Lewis school of believing that the only way to create an objective set of moral laws was to work from a few truths that are necessary for those laws to exist and work my way back to some higher power. Murder is wrong. How do you make that an objective statement. You assign intrinsic value to the individual humans. Where could that type of worth come from. An all-powerful being could be a source of that.

The catch now, is that by crossing off the higher power, I've essentially ended up discounting my views on morality.

So my question is, what fits in it's place.

The answer I've heard in general is 'empathy empathy empathy.' But I'm a little confused as to what makes empathy so special. It is, afterall, just an emotional reaction. What sets it apart from rage, lust, jealousy, etc...

The idea of 'I wouldn't like it if you stole my stuff so I won't steal yours' operates in such a narrow spectrum of reason. The flaws being that if I have no stuff, there is no threat to having my stuff stolen. Or if I'm powerful enough that you can't steal my stuff, then I can steal your stuff.

I suspect this is why we see 'accepted' morality go out the window as we venture further away from comfortable middle class types. Similarly, you remove the threat of lawful punishment, and it becomes open season. Streaming copyrighted video certainly isn't causing any empathy problems.

The easier (and more prevalent unfortunately) answer seems to just be nice, because being nice is nice. And don't put much thought into why. We could probably chalk it up to evolution. We've evolved into ants who follow rules because it's for the good of the nest. And as long as we don't put to much thought into it, I suppose that's enough. But we are a thoughtful species, theoretically. We can see that we've been trained to act out of our own best individual interests. And rational thinking is supposed to be what kept us from just going along and buying into the God story to begin with.

Are we just smart enough to not know there is a God, and then just replace him with feelings that were more or less imposed upon us by a few thousand years of religious dominated rule.

Interested to see what the answers to this are. During my time on the other side of this discussion, I always felt when atheists were pressed on what they believe, they quickly became uncomfortable, and tried to shift things back to why religion was stupid. Now that I've 'switched sides' there is no religious nonsense to get in the way.

First off - welcome to the forums.

Secondly - to properly reply to this is going to take either a very long post or a whole series of smaller ones.

I'll kick off with a couple of things and we can see how we go:

1. Your background is written large in your post. Your religion has ingrained in you the idea that people are in essence bad. This is simply not the case. People are a broad spectrum. Some are naturally "good" and some "bad." Now when I use terms like good and bad I am using in the sense that an onlooker might view our behaviour.

2. Again due to your background you are looking for a single primary cause of morality - it comes from here, or it comes from there. This is probably not the case - there are a whole host of potential factors determining our behaviour ranging from inherited traits to upbringing to mood and probably a dozen more. Empathy plays a role for certain as does conscience.

Now having established those 2 points I want to raise another issue. We tend to take morality as a single mass. We lump in our tendency not to commit murder with the act of returning a $10 bill to the man in front of us that just dropped it out of his pocket.

Whilst this is all essentially under the banner of morality it is not a stretch to think that the extremes come from very different places.

Taking the whole of morality, therefore, in all of its complexity and then attempting to explain it against the incredible complexity of society is probably all but impossible without writing your very own library.

For me it is easier to take things right back to basics - going back even before the birth of the hunter gatherer groups all the way back to instinctive behaviour (which we still exhibit) and then slowly overlaying morality as the groupings and societies get more complicated.

As an underlying fundament therefore I'd say we are social creatures that rely on team work to survive as a species. The same can be said for a pride of lions. Female lions work as a team to bring down game. One lion does not take advantage of another and kill it during the attack when that lion's flank is vulnerable. Their instinct to work together overcomes their killing instinct. I don't imagine lions have morality.

Early hominids probably worked much the same way. As their brains evolved so did the complexity of the rules and simple morality formed as an adjunct to instinct. Empathy probably came about sometime around this point - its a handy tool.

From there on in - ever increasing complexity of society went hand in hand with more complex morality.

I'll stop there for now - this is getting too long but we can continue to take it however far you want to.