Why be good?

[Esquilax]

If you've read all of the posts up to this point, you should have noted that the vast majority of the respondents to my OP have confirmed what I wrote. So, is that really such a big claim for me to make? If God does not exist (as everyone else but me accepts as true), then what IS the source of our understandings about "good" and "bad" and "right" and "wrong" if not "personal conviction and group consensus"? It seems to me that I've been overwhelmingly supported in this. Even by you here:

What did I say? Evidence "containing referents to the position I actually hold." Am I other people, or am I me?

But more importantly, you're changing around what you're talking about now, and I've noticed that so you're not going to get away with it; in the post I was responding to your assertion was that cooperation and social contract are inconsistent with a totally materialistic viewpoint, to which I pointed out that not only is that not atheism, but you've done nothing but assert it to begin with. Now you're acting as though I'm disagreeing with the idea that one's morality is drawn from personal or group consensus, but that wasn't what we were talking about a moment ago, and it's trivial anyway; of course morality is derived from personal conviction and group consensus, there are only persons and groups of persons to consider morality. Even god is a person, if we expand person to mean any thinking agent of sufficient complexity, which it is my position that we must do, in our considerations of morality, to avoid special pleading in favor of our own species. Doesn't mean that those determinations cannot be rationally based, nor that one cannot determine which is optimally better than another.

But there's nothing in this that is at odds with a materialistic viewpoint, given that humans are material, and groups of humans are material, and so on. So either you're changing the topic and hence making a response that is irrelevant to the point I actually made, or you're still just making a series of unjustified assertions about that point. Which is it?

I'm not buying it. When a lion kills a cub or runs off an older male in order to take over the pride, he is not thinking of what's better for the group...even though, ironically, his actions ARE what's best for the group. How is a third-world dictator acting any differently? Well, his actions may not be in the best interests of his country for starters, but he is still dominating the group in the same way the new alpha male lion is...by forceful takeover.

Randy, I've got some news for you. This may be hard to hear, so you may want to prepare yourself. Are you sitting down? Okay, here I go...

Humans aren't lions.

There, I said it. Humans aren't lions, and therefore the preconditions for what makes an individual human more successful are different for humans, than they are for lions. From the beginning, human beings have an evolutionary niche that prioritizes social grouping and cooperation, and if you'd take a moment to look at our goddamn history and think for a second, you'd see why that is; our dictatorships and our times of war aren't exactly our times of plenty, are they? Actually, they are times of mass death, starvation, and suffering. The times of our greatest prosperity are our peace times, our free-est countries are our better ones, the chances of you surviving and flourishing are leagues better when you are in a country that cooperates, and- and this point should be drilled into your head, though I have no doubt you'll pretend you never heard it if it's convenient for you- evolution happens to populations, not individuals.

But mostly that humans aren't lions thing. Amazing that you didn't get that yourself.

And yet, plagiarisim, corporate espionage, patent infringement, and even theft of cups of coffee, etc. happen all the time. Beyond that, I would agree with the balance of your paragraph.

Exceptions don't disprove the rule, else your christianity is just as false as my atheism, would you theists kindly stop with this childish "99% equals 0%" fallacy every goddamn time we discuss morality?

Is that what's happening in Baltimore? Or what happened in Ferguson? People stayed home and played parlor games because they knew that was better than going out into the streets and rioting?

Yeah, I'm sure everyone's lining up to argue that Baltimore and Ferguson, at the height of the rioting, was just an ideal, safe world that they'd love to live in 24-7. Actually think, before you speak.

I'm not specifying anything about you or me; however, if there is an opening when your boss retires...you do hope that YOU get the job and not one of your co-workers, right?

Sure, I like it when good things happen to me, so what? I'd even be disappointed if someone else gets the job, but you know what? I'll also be happy for their success, because it's possible to have more than one emotion at the same time, and I'll probably even congratulate them for it. Quit trying to extrapolate small, innocuous examples into enormous lifestyle choices.

God's laws are good because He is good. He gives us laws so that we become like Him.

So it's just whatever god says, then. So if god says murder is moral tomorrow, you'd have to agree, because god is good. So you're just following fiat command, the actual content of morality is irrelevant, and the idea that what you follow is in any way meaningful just went down the drain. Everything you understand to be moral could be inverted in a second, for no reason, and you'd just have to turn on a dime and accept it; your morality is more subjective than anything I have ever believed, so it's enormously rich for you to be prattling on about it the way you have. All the things you've tried attaching to atheism by fiat here stand an equal chance of becoming a part of your moral system as the things that are presently in them, yet they'll never be a part of mine, so where exactly do you get off arguing the way you do?

Nope. See above.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a theist just take a prong of Euthyphro's Dilemma before, mostly they try to squirm out of having to do so because they have the sense to recognize how poorly both prongs serve their argument. You just went ahead and scuttled your entire position.

A flawed premise leads to this false conclusion.

But it's not flawed, you agreed to one of the prongs.

You may be right.

Or    it may be that atheists simply don't see 1) the incompatibility of holding evolution as the mechanism by which we have arrived on the world stage while 2) simultaneously denying that putting others' interests above your own is in direct conflict with the evolutionary process that got us here in the first place.

Okay, I linked you to resources on survival of the fittest earlier, so you are officially lying by keeping this up. Congratulations, you have now proved yourself to be dishonest.