Replacing Religious Morality

[genkaus]

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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.

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Three things:

1. I've never found the whole "objective morality needs god" argument to be persuasive in the least. I won't get into it here, but a few discussions in the philosophy forum would show why god's actual existence is not going to make religious morality any more objective or the value of human life any more intrinsic.

2. I too find empathy to be a poor replacement for religious morality. A lot of atheists seem to have a one-track mind with regards to moraity: "Morality is about how you treat others. Empathy is one of the emotions about it. So, empathy should be the basis for you morality". I find this view to be woefully inadequate.

3. My own view is that morality is about how you live your life - not just with respect to others, but yourself as well. Without going into details, the simple idea is to figure out you need to do - considering your own life and the society you live in - in order to live the way you want to.