Atheist moral code

[Angrboda]

I posted this earlier today. It seems relevant.

Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself.

Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism

(my bold)It seems to me that they started with the conclusion and worked toward justifying it. This seems to be the case with most attempts at formulating a secular ethical theory. People start from the belief that violence and fraud are wrong then work backwards looking for ways to support that conclusion. It really isn't much better of an approach than 'Creation Science'.

Yeah, I thought that was Sartre's point. I'm not sure that everyone read that the same way.