Can an atheist be ethical like theists

[robvalue]

Drugs and incest? OK, weirdly specific.

Well it seems the discussion is over so I won't worry about these points. I think I made a very strong case as to why atheists are moral/ethical. It's no use pretending that they are not, because you can't understand how they possibly could be. Sure, you can disagree about certain points of morality. Everybody does. That is called subjective morality! If you are argueing against something on the grounds of wellbeing and harm, then that is not religious morality. If you're argueing on the grounds of "my God doesn't want that" then it's irrelevant. And you can't pretend all atheists and all secular communities have the same morality, so you can "prove it wrong". Every individual has their own morality, it is not dictated to them by society. It's the other way around, the morality of a society reflects a general agreement among individuals.

Objective morality, if such a thing exists, is entirely pointless because it's (a) arbitrary and (b) no one knows what it is. Sure, we have millions of people all claiming to know what it is, while disagreeing with each other, and none have any proof. So what use is that? It results once again in subjective morality. Any attempts to enforce religious objective morality ends in horrific situations, any time the moral in question is actually immoral by general secular standards (we only need to look at many countries in the East). And since secular morality improves, this is increasingly likely to be considered the case.

Morality of any meaning is man made, and justified by pointing to books by some people rather than using rational argument. "Nice" religious people increasingly ignore the majority of their holy books.