Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Polaris]

Quick question, if I may: entertaining for a moment the concept that "we all ultimately get our morality from religion" - where did religion get its morality from?

I ask for enlightenment, not to be arsey.

Since we are so long removed from those cultures, it has become the chicken or the egg paradox IMO.

[The Grand Nudger]

Then I am so long removed from the culture of that religion etc etc etc....

If you dont feel the need to credit whatever religion got it's morality from (or even investigate the issue, it seems) then I fail to see why we should credit religion for our current secular morality. This makes your earlier comment about what you perceive to be the ultimate origins of secular morality a bit mystifying...don't you think?

[Cyberman]

What Rhythm said. Also I feel your analogy is flawed, since we know the egg came before the chicken. It may not yet be a chicken egg, but evolutionarily speaking a descendant of that egg will be.

[Jackalope]

We all ultimately get our morality from religion. No matter how much many will say that religious law does not affect their morality, they are still affected by thousands of years of religious law becoming secular law. Even if the religions behind those laws are long extinct, their legacy still remains.

I can see why you would think this, and why it intuitively would seem so. There may be a degree of truth to it as well, in that culture is shaped by common values (which can be informed by religious doctrine). In cultures where there is a dominant religion, cultural values will tend to follow the values of the dominant religion, and some of those values will find their way into law.

I certainly don't deny that religion has played some role in the development of human morality and law.

HOWEVER... In many cases, acts which are proscribed by religion are also proscribed by humanistic value systems, seemingly because we are empathetic beings who value our own well-being and therefore are supportive of laws and customs that forbid certain acts (e.g. theft, murder, assault, rape), at least within our own cultural group. (I'll admit that historically, humanity has not been consistent at applying those values to people who are "not like us".) This is evidenced by observing cultures who proscribe such acts, and who have not been exposed to religion (as it is familiar to us). I don't have a cite handy, and can't recall the specifics, but I do recall an aboriginal culture that had no recognizable concept of deity, but who nonetheless had developed a system of cultural mores overlapping those influenced by Abrahamaic religions. Then there's the animistic / shamanistic cultures which I am not sure fit into the religious mold as we imagine.

It is not necessarily so that religion informs our sense of morality and law and that humanistic values evolved as a result. It's possible that primitive humanistic values predated religion, and religion was built in part on those values.

As religion predates recorded history, this seems to be a question with no clear answer.

(*) I'll note that the young earth creationist viewpoint could likely not find anything to agree with in the above. My post assumes an audience that accepts that human culture is much older than the YEC view, and that the Biblical account in Genesis and elsewhere does not mean that all of humanity was descended from two persons with direct or indirect revelatory knowledge. I don't see much purpose in discussing this issue with someone who holds that viewpoint, as there will be little common ground to start from. (While I don't personally believe the creation story, or believe in revealed knowledge, I would not make those points of contention for the purposes of this thread.)

[Polaris]

Then I am so long removed from the culture of that religion etc etc etc....

If you dont feel the need to credit whatever religion got it's morality from (or even investigate the issue, it seems) then I fail to see why we should credit religion for our current secular morality. This makes your earlier comment about what you perceive to be the ultimate origins of secular morality a bit mystifying...don't you think?

The laws come from religion, but it is whether the laws for religion come from the concept of religion itself or were innately created within the collective subconscious of the culture and then applied to their religious beliefs.

If you want facts, Hammurabi's Code is a later addition that incorporates religious law into the secular.

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you entirely sure that these laws come from religion. It could just as easily be the case that religion is (now and has been) leveraged as a shortcut to authority in support of said laws.

(I thought this was a chicken or egg scenario a moment ago?)

[Cyberman]

So just to clarify, if such is what I'm doing: are you saying that what we would regard as laws were originally, at some period lost in the mists of human history, collated and codified into some form of religious practise perhaps for the very purpose of applying those laws?

[genkaus]

Is this the post you wanted me to respond to genkaus? Sorry I might have found it boring so I ignored it. I can respond to it now if you'd like.

Can't wait.

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Since we are so long removed from those cultures, it has become the chicken or the egg paradox IMO.

Actually, it hasn't. Since we do know that people came together to live in societies long before they invented religion, we can say that morality came first.

[DeistPaladin]

Religion is intertwined in culture itself, not just our values. And like culture, it is an attempt to explain and adapt to reality as a given people know it. Why there are certain taboos in a religion are often explained by hazards that a given people who invented the religion faced. The rewards of the gods often reflect what a people need or desire most.

Part of the reason Hollywood depicts Heaven as a domain in the clouds has to do with primitive humans looking up to the sky and deciding that the deceptively solid looking formations above was the abode of the gods. Christians, when in feelings of religious bliss, will reach their hands up to the sky, even in an age when we know the world is round and "up" is relative and there is are no angles dancing in the wisps of condensation above. This is one example of how perceived reality by primitive humans affected how the religion was shaped.

Religion, like art, also changes over time and adopts other ideas from other cultures. Christianity itself seems like the clear amalgamation of Judaism with various pagan ideas. The very concepts of Hell and eternal salvation are nowhere to be found in the OT and the idea of an intercessor deity in Christ is positively blasphemous to the Jewish god who demanded the undivided attention of his people (the need for the mental gymnastics of the Trinity is obvious in this conundrum).

We see this even in minor aspects of Christianity, so easy to overlook. Yahweh NEVER smote anyone with lightning in the Bible. Yet, it's a cliche of the modern Christian concept of God isn't it? That's Zeus' schtick, smiting sinners with the thunderbolt. In fact, the vision of the anthropomorphic god of Christianity looks suspiciously like Zeus, the old-yet-youthful man with the long beard and the Greek style robe. And Lucifer is a cross between the god of passion Pan (with his goat legs and horns) and Hades, the god of the underworld.

If you change a culture's religion, you change the culture in ways that are immediately noticeable. A people that convert to Islam begin to adopt trappings of Arabic or Middle-Eastern style culture. Even atheists in America will exclaim "Jesus" in moments of surprise, reflecting growing up in a Christian majority culture. As a culture loses its religion, the culture also changes. We'll see what happens in the world as this development unfolds.

That's my long answer. The short one is art, culture, values and religion are all interwoven.

[Polaris]

So just to clarify, if such is what I'm doing: are you saying that what we would regard as laws were originally, at some period lost in the mists of human history, collated and codified into some form of religious practise perhaps for the very purpose of applying those laws?

In a way, yes. One person said that religion was one of the greatest good for early societies because it helped to solidify a sense of justice and common identity necessary for the societies to thrive. It did not arise out of a need to exert order, but to create order among a band of Mesolithic-Neolithic tribesman.