The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith

[Ryantology]

This is a fairly simple problem to solve.

1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba

I accept the existence of the only kind of morality which has ever existed: arbitrary, subjective morality. To argue from a position of objective morality is meaningless: no such thing has ever existed. Even if we assumed that God existed, morals attributed to God are no less subjective and arbitrary than secular morals, and there is no justifiable basis to assert that God's morals are of any greater value than secular.

Morals are, to put it most simply, guidelines by which society can best function and people can most amicably co-exist, and as such, arbitrary secular morals are demonstrably far superior to arbitrary God morals (which, as we all know, are loaded with all kinds of terrible, destructive and divisive tenets). Secular morals are also superior in that they are flexible, and subject to improvement and refinement, whereas God's morals are rigid and unbending. Society, economics and politics never saw any substantial improvement until Godly morals began to give way to secular morals. Theists love to take credit for such developments as the abolition of slavery, the Enlightenment and the fostering of science, but the reality of it is that slavery, ignorance, and opposition to science were (and in many ways continue to be) the result of applying Biblical morality.

The value we place on life has pretty much everything to do with how deeply we can empathize with it. Most people value cats and dogs, because it is possible to form relationships with them. Few people value amoeba because that's not possible. We have a hard time empathizing with creatures which we perceive to be threats, and this is not always justified. What sets us apart from you is that an honest secularist can admit this. You're just lying to yourself.

2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings

As above, it is impossible to apply an objective value to human beings. Religions claim otherwise, yet one needs only to open to any random page in a history book to find some sinister example of religion, or religious-driven people, arbitrarily deciding that some humans are less valuable than others, examples being the African slave trade, the subjugation of women as second-class citizens, and the brutal oppression of the Jews. Secularists are, of course, guilty of this as well, but again, we can be honest about our shortcomings. You're pretending that yours don't exist (or, popularly, that those among your number who are guilty of it are not True Scotsmen).

The morality of Christianity is brutal, selfish, sycophantic and hateful. On all levels. Even many of the 'good' parts are sinister if you examine them closely. There are many decent Christian people, but the reason they are decent is because they pay lip service to their faith. They cherrypick the Bible and discard all of the horrifying commandments which are not acceptable in an enlightened society (or just discard it altogether and stick to a highly-sanitized Hippie Jesus ideal). A Christian who sincerely tries to live by biblical morality is a bad person because they glorify and endorse the worst kinds of evil.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than a Christian who assumes he occupies the moral high ground. Your morality is based on lies and is primitive and savage. It is just barely above that of animals. I'm not impressed by your presumptions.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

"Bad person"?! According to what? The bible?

I think you can have a knowledge of ethics that it is wrong to direct your will without any wisdom guiding it. It is similar to the concept of rationality. Epistemology and ethics are closely intertwined.

That's not obvious to me. Just because I think it is good to use wisdom to decide what is "right" or "wrong" doesn't mean that that is therefore "right" to apply wisdom in directing my will. I can't see anything wrong with me acting only on impulse. But that's not something I'd like to do because I value a long and successful life and not using wisdom to decide what to do would not accomplish what I want.

I only use wisdom in trying to achieve my already arbitrary desires and morals. I don't use wisdom to decide what these desires and morals should be however because I can't see how one set of values can be better or worse than another set. In that I go by instinct.

To be a Christian really means that your will is always directed towards wisdom. I believe that there could be alternative ways of understanding God, that could also be directed towards wisdom, or towards human nature and the glory of God represented in nature.

So I think that the sort of nihilistic ethics would be condemned in pretty much every single religion and philosophy ever developed. People are created to direct their wills towards what is good, and it is possible to know what is good. Is the knowledge of what is good less important than knowing the details of esoteric scientific theories, if they can even be understood at all?

That's just part of your worldview. It poses no problem to me until you prove that your religion is true.

Human biology and culture reveals that it is wrong to be foolish and direct the will only the pleasures or arbitrarily.

Really? How so? It seems like your already assuming a set of values to reach that conclusion.

Nihilism is a way of saying that foolishness is acceptable because there is no such thing as wisdom. As hinted at before, this also destroys the foundations of atheist epistemology, at least epistemology understood in a sense in which there are duties to accept the fruits of epistemology.

This is just appeal to consequences fallacy.

Anyone who defends nihilism is defending that it is ok to be a bad person. I think it is safe to call them a bad person.

Again that's just a judgement from the assumption of your own worldview. It doesn't discount nihilism or moral subjectivity in general.

I haven't studied nihilism very much btw. I just don't believe in objective moral values. If that makes me a nihilist so be it.

[genkaus]

If naturalism is true e.g. there is no God and the material universe, more or less, is all that exists, the naturalist is faced with two possible stances:

Bravo. Excellent. Very well-done. You start a topic about atheism and in the very first sentence address naturalism - in an extremely pathetic attempt to equate the two and hope no one would notice.

1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba
2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings

Or

3. Understand that value is a property attached to all self-conscious entities that would make humans more valuable than amoeba.
4. Realize that the concept of value stems from our desires - which are part of our biology - and therefore any assignment of value in accordance with that would not be arbitrary.
5. Realize that a rational mind produces and ascribes value to all entities and therefore to humans themselves

And so on. Don't put forth any more false dichotomies and expect us to swallow them.

I believe that choice two, which is what the vast majority of atheists choose to do is epistemologically very similar to religious faith.

Well, then it's a good thing that most atheists don't pick choice 2. In my experience, they usually go for 4.

In religious faith, people recognize a moral, teleological order of life in which value is ascribed to human beings as a consequence of them being created.

Which would be as subjective and arbitrary as the supposed atheistic assignment,

In atheism, the value is simply ascribed to human life. The atheist might object that the value is not an objective fact, but only what is consider to be objective, but that completely denies the way that atheists use moral language (see, the language of liberalism).

See what I'm talking about - you go from naturalist to atheist as if they mean the same thing. Deplorable.

For the record, as an atheist, I can and have argued for value as an objective concept - thereby proving you wrong before you even showed your face.

I would argue, follow Alaisdair MacIntyre, that atheists have essentially a choice between Nietzschean nihilism or Aristotelian teleological ethics. Many atheists really in secret have a sort of Deist, teleological approach to ethics when they invoke evolutionary processes as grounding human life in some sort of goal driven process that confers moral worth on people. If they were honest atheists, they would simply call themselves Deists and accept that the way they talk about evolution is essentially giving a teleological property to it that it lacks in the naturalistic understanding. Evolution says nothing about why people should be considered more ethically valuable than rocks, to say so is to move from atheistic evolution to theistic or deistic evolution.

Wow, fallacy of equivocation now? You really are trying to hit every one of them, aren't you?

Do you not understand that even Aristotelian ethics is based on naturalism and not on any deistic approach? Do you not understand that even if the evolutionary process had resulted in an in-built purpose and goal for the human species - that still wouldn't make it god - and therefore not make an atheist a deist?

Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.

So, morality does depend on biology but biology can't prescribe morality? Way to stay consistent.

The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist. The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.

Ofcourse there is a reason: you gave it yourself. Morality prescribes what you should or shouldn't do. Pain is something that you want to avoid. That connects morality and pain.

The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.

Apart form the obvious objection that there are many more options available - making this another false dichotomy - acceptance of teleological universe is unnecessary. Moral language doesn't refer to the universe, it refers only to humanity and therefore, only teleological existence of humanity would be required. And that position wouldn't require deism either. A purpose or goal applicable to all of humanity may as well be inherent to our biology or the consequence of application of rationality or indicative of humanity's common desire or simply agreed upon by all humans. No god is necessary for any of the above scenarios.

What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.

Or he can ridicule the ideas of a Christian blowhard for the nonsense they are and figure out that
a) he does not need to ground his ethical concepts in teleology - deontology would serve him as well
b) even if he does ground it on teleology, he still doesn't need to use any faith. There is a host of objectively proven facts that serve as the basis.
c) and realize that the deistic or Christian grounds are the more unreasonable than the above.

The Christian is not irrational in grounding his beliefs in a supernatural religion (I myself have experienced many supernatural confirmations of the Christian faith).

My friend, grounding your beliefs in the irrational is by definition - irrational.

It is the atheist who is irrational in grounding his ethical concepts, the most important in life, in arbitrary ethical concepts that, no matter how much evidence is revealed, will never be found to have any value, because the concepts have no ground other than the opinions of the atheist.[/u][/i]

Good thing then that atheists rarely base their ethical concepts in other "arbitrary" ethical concepts.

---

That person should not vote, they should abandon all pretense of having a moral authority, they should not marry or raise a family because they will be unable to teach their children to be good people, they should not engage in any activity which requires moral reasoning, which is almost everything.

Most of all, they should never pressure anyone to accept their beliefs, because there is no ethical imperative attached to following or not following their beliefs.

Actually, if he is a nihilist, then none of your "shoulds" are applicable to him. If he so wants, then he can vote, pretend to have moral authority, marry, raise a family or pressure others to accept his beliefs. Randall says it best:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/nihilism.png

Of course, most atheist who read this will acknowledge the contradiction involved in their "ethical atheism" and go on, continuing to exist that Christians have some sort of made up imperative to be "honest" according to the standard that atheists make up.

They may be able to do it legally, but they cannot be consistent with themselves. They should not do it without a deep sense of cynicism.

Read and rejected.

I see no contradiction involved in my "ethical atheism".

---

You are repeating the main point of the post. Exactly, what makes people more important than dolphins? Or ants, for that matter? Why should human civilization exist at all, why not be a primitivist? Why not believe that one race is superior to another, or create a nationalistic morality?

The human capacity act rationally. That is why dolphins are such an issue - they seem to be showing signs of being able to do that as well.

The most important question in the world is how to be a good person.

Not for me. The most important question for me is "how do I live a happy and fulfilling life?".

You are not really getting to the bottom of the issue. Nothing that you have written scratches the surface of the debates surrounding moral skepticism. Because you have a nicer sounding name for moral skepticism, called existentialism, does not answer the question. What makes people more important than dolphins. Or in another way: How do you know that Jewish people aren't inferior to whites? Why shouldn't one group enslave another group?

Because the human capacity to act rationally is superior. And there is no known variation between racial capacity - thus it must be assumed equal.

---

If there are no moral imperatives, the only ground for actions is pure cynicism.

Nonsense. You still have self-interest to go on.

It is even more egregious cynicism to suggest there is some sort of paradox there, as you are doing.

Other than you, I see no one suggesting a paradox.

If you are a nihilist, you cannot be a moral person. You would argue, as someone that is incapable of being a moral person, I have no duty to be a moral person.

Sounds logical to me.

No, as a person who is amoral, what you are free to do is to live in complete cynicism. If you participate in the political processes and speak as if there are moral absolutes, you are a liar, plain and simple. Of course you do not have duties to avoid lying, but the linguistic categories of cynicism and deceit still apply to you.

Still not seeing a paradox.

But this gets back to my original point: there is really no duty attached to any of this, for the nihilist. But the nihilist will separate himself from the rest of the world, which does not function according to this pattern, and will be hated, as is appropriate.

Why would he do that? He has no pattern according to which the world is supposed to function. And why would anyone hate them? When you want to have some fun, nihilists make a splendid company.

[Mystic]

If nihilism is true no one can handle the truth. No one can function. We evolved believing in value, praise and morals. Chaotic world as we live, and we come to realize, who has the accurate view of value, praise, and morals?

People look towards charismatic people for their foundation praise. This has been true of societies for the longest time.

You need to praise yourself even if the whole world condemns you.

My advice atheists,is to praise yourself honestly, neither deceiving yourself neither underestimating yourself...In that praise...you will find the impulse and hear the wisdom of the heart.

Honesty is the sword of the soul. It wants to make you something better, but not trick you into thinking your something that your not.

I love you all and don't look down upon either Atheists, Muslims or Christians.

I myself don't believe in "God" or "Gods" but finding myself believing in supernatural metaphysical existence simply because I can't get myself to disbelieve in it, for it would be disbelieving everything I hear that I am.

I am not back. This is my only post (hopefully).

[genkaus]

Where does the victims "right to live" come from?

From the recognition of his capacity for self-determination.
Or from social contract agree upon.
Or from his desire not to die.

To be an honest atheist means to reflect on the nature of these concepts.

No, being an honest atheist means admitting to disbelief in god. You can still lie about everything else and not reflect on anything you don't want to.

Is your knowledge that there is right to live stronger than your belief in absolute, unguided atheistic evolution as the means by which life was created? I do not think you can have both.

I do have both. Yay.

Why do people have a right to live more than ameobas?

Because amoebas are not a part of human society - d'uh.

Religious morality and secular morality are totally different. Religious morality says that people are created with a certain nature, and to disagree with that nature is to rebel against God. Things are not only prohibited because God forbids them, they are prohibited because that prohibition is part of the divine order of the universe that is established.

Isn't that the greatest irony of it all? Religious morality is the one thing that almost consistently dictates that you go against your nature.

A good person is a person that lives in a way that is consistent with how people are created to live.

Given that people weren't created, much less created to live in a particular way, there can be be no such thing as a good person.

That is true that you get your morals from the culture you are from, but that does nothing to deal with the problem of cultural relativism. What if you have a choice to either fight in the Chinese military or the American military. How do you know which country to serve? Should you follow Hitler because you were born in Germany.

If you can, try to pick the winning side. Or better still, stay out of it.

---

To be a Christian really means that your will is always directed towards wisdom.

Then why is it that Christians are often so stupid?

I believe that there could be alternative ways of understanding God, that could also be directed towards wisdom, or towards human nature and the glory of God represented in nature.

Except, there is no way understand what doesn't exist.

So I think that the sort of nihilistic ethics would be condemned in pretty much every single religion and philosophy ever developed.

Except, you know, the nihilistic philosophies themselves.

People are created to direct their wills towards what is good, and it is possible to know what is good. Is the knowledge of what is good less important than knowing the details of esoteric scientific theories, if they can even be understood at all?

Given that those "esoteric scientific theories" can and do inform one's position on the knowledge of good and that people without those theories can and do fall prey to corrupted knowledge of good as presented by various religions (esp. Christianity) - yes, it is.

Human biology and culture reveals that it is wrong to be foolish and direct the will only the pleasures or arbitrarily. Nihilism is a way of saying that foolishness is acceptable because there is no such thing as wisdom. As hinted at before, this also destroys the foundations of atheist epistemology, at least epistemology understood in a sense in which there are duties to accept the fruits of epistemology.

Given that nihilism doesn't say that - I don't see any foundations being destroyed.

So nihilism really is incompatible with the aggressive scientism that dominates atheist discourse. Christianity is actually close in many ways to the rationality of science. Christianity demands that the will be filled with epistemologically responsible concepts at all times. This is what nihilism denies.

I always laugh out loud when I see rationality and Christianity in the same sentence. Clearly, you seem to have little knowledge of demands of Christianity and none of nihilism.

Anyone who defends nihilism is defending that it is ok to be a bad person. I think it is safe to call them a bad person.

Actually, why stop at nihilism? This is just another way of saying that anyone defending a morality which is not my morality is a bad person according to my morality. Therefore, it is safe to call him a bad person according to my morality.

---

I can't decide if you have your head in the clouds or up your ass. But in this you are on the same level with plenty of atheists.

Was that a dig at me?

You insist on placing morality under the domain of reason,

He does no such thing. He tries to, but fails miserably.

but that is not where morality comes from.

As we've previously established - maybe not yours.

No one responds to morally reprehensible behavior involving cruelty to others in a purely intellectual way.

I do.

"Gee, don't they realize that their actions, if adopted by everyone, could one day result in harm to me or mine?" That isn't the way it works.

Not the line of reasoning I'd use.

It is empathy for others which makes us recoil against cruelty, and empathy operates at the level of feeling, not rationality.

And a highly unreliable basis it is.

There is no need to justify an assignment of value to people objectively, for either theists or atheists, if you recognize that empathy and not rationality is the basis of morality.

You mean, for your morality - which is self-contradictory and unreliable.

One need not have a reasonable justification for rejecting cruelty in order to avoid what one finds unpleasant.

Unless they wish to actually justify their position and expect others to share it.

In the same way I need not have an objective basis for rejecting store-bought mayonnaise in order to leave it off my sandwiches.

But then, you don't expect others to do the same, do you?

In both cases I avoid what I don't like and pursue what I do. That isn't to say that rationality doesn't come into play to sort out conflicts in our empathy or tastes or preferences or desires generally. Of course it does.

Thereby showing why it serves as an unreliable basis.

That in fact is the proper use of rationality, to serve feeling and come up with strategic goals for maximizing that which one is drawn to and avoid that which one is repulsed by. One just needs to keep rationality in its place.

"Proper use"? How very teleological of you. Tell me, how did you divine that that was the "proper use" of rationality or who told that? The little bird that sings inside you?

[Something completely different]

If naturalism is true e.g. there is no God and the material universe, more or less, is all that exists, the naturalist is faced with two possible stances:

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YES exactly. Everything you wrote here isnt worth a damn. Let alone worth reading, right after the moment you used the sentence "If naturalism is true". Thereby taking the possition of being the high judge on what certain mindest are and determening what their consequences can only be. I might have problems expressing it in the english language but in german we call it "hochnäsig" or maybe even "totaler Wahrheitsanspruch" or even "Halbwissen" which could translate to "asserting to know everything about something whilest one actualy knows nothing about the subject one is talking about".

I think in english one uses the term "mental masturbation" which is used here only by bavarian comedians "geistige masturbation"

[Gilgamesh]

1 is prettymuch me, yes.

[genkaus]

I accept the existence of the only kind of morality which has ever existed: arbitrary, subjective morality. To argue from a position of objective morality is meaningless: no such thing has ever existed. Even if we assumed that God existed, morals attributed to God are no less subjective and arbitrary than secular morals, and there is no justifiable basis to assert that God's morals are of any greater value than secular.

I strongly disagree. God's moral's are certainly more subjective and arbitrary than secular morals and thus they most certainly are of lesser value. But then, given your arguments below, I'd say you believe that as well.

Morals are, to put it most simply, guidelines by which society can best function and people can most amicably co-exist, and as such, arbitrary secular morals are demonstrably far superior to arbitrary God morals (which, as we all know, are loaded with all kinds of terrible, destructive and divisive tenets). Secular morals are also superior in that they are flexible, and subject to improvement and refinement, whereas God's morals are rigid and unbending. Society, economics and politics never saw any substantial improvement until Godly morals began to give way to secular morals. Theists love to take credit for such developments as the abolition of slavery, the Enlightenment and the fostering of science, but the reality of it is that slavery, ignorance, and opposition to science were (and in many ways continue to be) the result of applying Biblical morality.

No arguments, except that the purpose of morality is not limited to guiding society and people towards amicable co-existence.

The value we place on life has pretty much everything to do with how deeply we can empathize with it. Most people value cats and dogs, because it is possible to form relationships with them. Few people value amoeba because that's not possible. We have a hard time empathizing with creatures which we perceive to be threats, and this is not always justified. What sets us apart from you is that an honest secularist can admit this. You're just lying to yourself.

Not universally true, but it is true in general.

As above, it is impossible to apply an objective value to human beings.

I'd disagree there. Application of objective value is possible if you devise a standard to measure that value against. It is not possible currently because no such standard exists. Though we are getting there - given that value of human life often comes up in civil cases.

[Gilgamesh]

YES exactly. Everything you wrote here isnt worth a damn. Let alone worth reading, right after the moment you used the sentence "If naturalism is true". Thereby taking the possition of being the high judge on what certain mindest are and determening what their consequences can only be. I might have problems expressing it in the english language but in german we call it "hochnäsig" or maybe even "totaler Wahrheitsanspruch" or even "Halbwissen" which could translate to "asserting to know everything about something whilest one actualy knows nothing about the subject one is talking about".

I think in english one uses the term "mental masturbation" which is used here only by bavarian comedians "geistige masturbation"

Wow! You sure showed him!

[jstrodel]

What I said here addresses the overarching problem of these questions. Secular morality looks at the effects certain actions have upon other people, by individuals and groups.

No, what you consider "effects" are just social constructions and linguistic categories designed to capture certain things that some people thought were worth capturing. Any conception of what the "effects" of things are is purely phenomenological. You actually have no business talking about what the effects of your actions are because if you are honest about your methodology, you will realize you know next to nothing.

The right to live stands, in this context, on the fact that as atheists, we believe that there is nothing after we stop living, therefore removing one's right to life removes each and every other right they have as well. And it's irreversible. Once they're dead, there's no returning their rights to them.
We ascribe rights to people because we ourselves want them, and feel bad when they're taken away, and the best way to not have them taken from us is to make sure no one else feels like they're getting their taken away.

What do you call this process of ascribing rights? You havn't answered the question of why it is wrong to believe certain things upon insufficient evidence as it relates to theology but not according to something like ascribing rights.

You have not said where any of the rights come from. It is true that peoples rights leave them when they die, if atheism is true and they have rights, but you have not demonstrated that people have rights at all.

I believe that you have insufficient evidence to believe that people ever have rights that they can lose. You have not demonstrated that people are more important than rocks. If you were consistent with your extremely important ethical views, you would consider if the probability of deism or Christianity was greater than the probability of total nihilism.

We're biased towards our own kind. Is that so unusual in the human race? We show preference for individuals we share sympathies with all the time. We have little in relation to amoebas, so we don't consider them as important.

You have not begin to deal with the issue of normative claims and why that sort of bias should result in them.

You're missing out the fact that according to your theology, god made that divine order, so it is still just him saying something and it being so. There's no reason behind it, it's just god's arbitrary say-so

No, this is an extremely superficial view of something that shows you have probably never read a book on Christian apolgetics from start to finish.

The that God wills something entails that the things basic nature can be understood by recognizing the will of God. It is typical of the culture and attitude of the atheist, typically under 25, proud and haughty, who takes pleasure in things like pornography and filthy language to question "God's arbitrary say so". It is the sort of spirit that comes from rebellious adolescence, not a real philosophical difficulty.

God made the divine order and the nature of the order is understood in understanding God. To understand the will of God is to understand why everything is what it appears to be. God's will is the essence of the universe, its telos, it is the noumenal world. It is much, much more real and clear than what people see, and as such, it forms not only a normative claim for morality but also for understanding the nature of life.

Believe it or not, the religious categories were arbitrarily created too, by the people who wrote the holy books. The only difference is that secular morality updates itself, where as religious morality has an annoying habit of staying constantly the same whilst the rest of society has moved on.

As I said before, secular morality is created, yes, I acknowledge that, it's not always just been here. but it's a testament to humanity in my opinion that we have taken the time to actually give ourselves morals, to stand up and say that murder is wrong, that stealing hurts others.
To invent a god and make it the reason we have morality instead of our own compassion and empathy is in many ways lazy and cowardly.

You have not made a single argument. You are just like other atheists, relying on propaganda tricks instead of actually making real arguments. How do you define "move on"? You have not even begun to show how morality can progress. How can morality progress if there is no anchor? You acknowledge it changes, you have more or less acknowledged the main point of the message: that secular morality is just peoples opinions. If people want to be more consistent about the way that they use language, which suggests that it is NOT merely peoples opinions, why not consider Deism, or Christianity? Then you are not living out of irrational linguistic constructions that imply certain things about the world that violate the atheist epistemological rules of basing all beliefs on evidence. There is no evidence that the social norms you refer to are more than different peoples opinions. You can choose between Aristotle or Nietzsche, but you cannot be an ethical atheist.

---

I can't decide if you have your head in the clouds or up your ass. But in this you are on the same level with plenty of atheists. You insist on placing morality under the domain of reason, but that is not where morality comes from. No one responds to morally reprehensible behavior involving cruelty to others in a purely intellectual way. "Gee, don't they realize that their actions, if adopted by everyone, could one day result in harm to me or mine?" That isn't the way it works. It is empathy for others which makes us recoil against cruelty, and empathy operates at the level of feeling, not rationality.

There is no need to justify an assignment of value to people objectively, for either theists or atheists, if you recognize that empathy and not rationality is the basis of morality. One need not have a reasonable justification for rejecting cruelty in order to avoid what one finds unpleasant. In the same way I need not have an objective basis for rejecting store-bought mayonnaise in order to leave it off my sandwiches. In both cases I avoid what I don't like and pursue what I do. That isn't to say that rationality doesn't come into play to sort out conflicts in our empathy or tastes or preferences or desires generally. Of course it does. That in fact is the proper use of rationality, to serve feeling and come up with strategic goals for maximizing that which one is drawn to and avoid that which one is repulsed by. One just needs to keep rationality in its place.

What you said is something that you have not spent more than 50 hours of your life thinking through, which is too bad because it is the most important thing in life, how to be a good person. You are saying that the ultimate ground of morality is in our feelings? I agree with you about the role of feelings in mediating knowledge, but it is because peoples sense of empathy is designed to promote a certain response. What you are saying actually really has no bearing on this debate at all, you have completely trivialized my point.

If empathy is the way that you know how to live a good life, that still raises the question that what is it that grounds empathetic emotions and makes them ethically normative. It sounds like you are really confused yourself, because you acknowledge the role that reason could have in assessing empathetic emotions. In reality, you have not solved the problem at all, what is the ultimate ground of morality. Your response seems to be "peoples opinions". How does this avoid the dangerous trap of nihilism? You think that you can take one feeling "empathy" and assign it a place of ethical primacy over other feelings such as "anger" or "sexual arrousal". This is typical liberal sophistry. No civilization in history has ever survived based on the shallow, childlike conception of morality that you have, saying "it is better to be empathetic but sometimes you have to use reason". The fact that some emotions are more correlated with violence and others more strongly correlated with anger does not provide any sort of justification whatsoever for any of them. They are all human nature, I would argue that empathy, along with all other human emotions are vital for morality. But they are vital because people are created to use them that way. The ground of morality is not in the feelings themselves, it is in the interrelation between the feelings, the people, the societies, the world around and the ultimate plans and intentions of God.

Why should I believe that empathy is the basis of morality? I do not believe that reason is the basis of morality, I believe that God is.

What you are doing is similar to what fidists do when they think that belief in God is justifiable not because of evidence for God's existence is true but because of a will to believe. You think because of some sort of will to show empathy or a will to create empathetic beliefs or wills confers some sort of ethical justification. How are you not violating the atheist principle of proportioning beliefs to evidence? What evidence is there for empathy carrying in itself the moral action and what is the ground for that?

You are like other atheists who would rather dance around the issue than get to the substance of it. How does what you have said avoid moral skepticism? Why should anyone feel that their empathetic beliefs should take primacy over others. But you avoid these questions and instead just repeat propaganda and ad hoc answers. I have seen God and I know that there are answers to these questions. But they won't come to people that are afraid to seriously question the philosophical unity of their beliefs.

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This is a fairly simple problem to solve.

1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba

I accept the existence of the only kind of morality which has ever existed: arbitrary, subjective morality. To argue from a position of objective morality is meaningless: no such thing has ever existed. Even if we assumed that God existed, morals attributed to God are no less subjective and arbitrary than secular morals, and there is no justifiable basis to assert that God's morals are of any greater value than secular.

The fact that you made this point shows you have never seriously studied Christian philosophy. Of course there is a reason that God's choices represent a higher morality than peoples: God created everything. Everything around the world bears the mark of something created by God. God judgements about things describe the essential nature of things. He created things moral nature and destiny at the same time he created their physical nature, the two are related.

This line of inquiry resembles a little boy who looks at his family and questions his "intrinsic duties to obey his parents". The only reason that it can survive because this is the best ferment of atheism, the 13-20 year old demographic.

Morals are, to put it most simply, guidelines by which society can best function and people can most amicably co-exist, and as such, arbitrary secular morals are demonstrably far superior to arbitrary God morals (which, as we all know, are loaded with all kinds of terrible, destructive and divisive tenets). Secular morals are also superior in that they are flexible, and subject to improvement and refinement, whereas God's morals are rigid and unbending. Society, economics and politics never saw any substantial improvement until Godly morals began to give way to secular morals. Theists love to take credit for such developments as the abolition of slavery, the Enlightenment and the fostering of science, but the reality of it is that slavery, ignorance, and opposition to science were (and in many ways continue to be) the result of applying Biblical morality.

Western civilization is intimately connected with Christian history. Your concept of morals has very little to do with the way that almost every civilization in world history has understood morality. You understand morality to mean something like "what the present culture accepts". This has very little to do with Biblical morality.

Why should you be able to apply your arbitrary stick of morality to the Bible? If it is appropriate for you to make up a standard of morality and apply it to morality, would it be equally appropriate to simply make up a standard of morality and judge you by it? What would that mean, exactly.

The value we place on life has pretty much everything to do with how deeply we can empathize with it. Most people value cats and dogs, because it is possible to form relationships with them. Few people value amoeba because that's not possible. We have a hard time empathizing with creatures which we perceive to be threats, and this is not always justified. What sets us apart from you is that an honest secularist can admit this. You're just lying to yourself.

You are reducing morality to feelings and you are calling me dishonest. Why don't you go evangelize to Christians and tell them they must obey your beliefs. Use normative language and emotions that signify absolute values and sort of snicker to yourself as you know inside the values are no more real than your preferences. The fact that you are relying on empathy to define morality shows that you have some residue of teleological ethics. This does not fit with naturalistic evolution. Empathy is no more or less significant than anything else, if atheism is true. But in Christianity, as in most of the world religion, love triumphs over all. You don't see this much in atheist circles though. You see a lot of talk about empathy, but a lot of cold, mean, proud people. Perhaps it is because there is very little epistemic weigh attached to the concept, as an atheist.

2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings
As above, it is impossible to apply an objective value to human beings. Religions claim otherwise, yet one needs only to open to any random page in a history book to find some sinister example of religion, or religious-driven people, arbitrarily deciding that some humans are less valuable than others, examples being the African slave trade, the subjugation of women as second-class citizens, and the brutal oppression of the Jews. Secularists are, of course, guilty of this as well, but again, we can be honest about our shortcomings. You're pretending that yours don't exist (or, popularly, that those among your number who are guilty of it are not True Scotsmen).

You are not dealing with my claims, but instead offering a pop-historical, pop-ethical smear of Christianity. I will not even respond to the strawman about me pretending I'm not guilty and the lies about Christians not being honest about their shortcomings. Typical atheist drivel.

The morality of Christianity is brutal, selfish, sycophantic and hateful. On all levels. Even many of the 'good' parts are sinister if you examine them closely. There are many decent Christian people, but the reason they are decent is because they pay lip service to their faith. They cherrypick the Bible and discard all of the horrifying commandments which are not acceptable in an enlightened society (or just discard it altogether and stick to a highly-sanitized Hippie Jesus ideal). A Christian who sincerely tries to live by biblical morality is a bad person because they glorify and endorse the worst kinds of evil.

You probably spend more time watching political shows then you spend thinking about how to be a good person. Politically, Christians have built the most free societies on earth, including the ones that permit you to advance your nihilistic faith. But you equate morality with politics, which shows the depth of your understanding about morality. Have you ever really cared about anyone? What have you ever done for others in your life? What was the most noble deed you have ever done?

And what is the justification for your ethical categories? You treat your approach to ethics as having some sense of absolute value, but you just mentioned above that it does not. You are making up a system of morality, but you have never ran a nation. You do not know what it is like to fight a war, or organize and economy. You consider yourself free to invent your own absolute ethics and impose them over the Bible. I would't be surprised if you have never even owned a house, and you a probably ready to make all these judgements and sweeping statements about Christian values.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than a Christian who assumes he occupies the moral high ground. Your morality is based on lies and is primitive and savage. It is just barely above that of animals. I'm not impressed by your presumptions.

I don't make assumptions. I have seen thousands and thousands of events in my life that confirmed the reality of God and the Holy Spirit. I have seen miracle after miracle. Once I prayed and asked God if I should change my name from Jay to Joseph, a symbol of a new life. God responded by giving a prophetic word to a prophet - "Your name is Joseph". Then someone confirmed the prophecy about a week later.

I used to be an atheist. I used to go on the internet and talk to people all the time and try to prove how smart I was. I used to base all my beliefs about things that I believed in my head. And then I got out and exactly experienced religion and saw the reality of God.

How many religious people do you know? Probably right now you and your atheist friends are smoking weed, watching porn and playing video games. That is what atheists typically do with their morality. Not all of them, a lot of them. They take serious topics, like this one, and make adolescent sexual references. They try to get young people to accept their beliefs using the allure of freedom from religious restrictions as well as sensuality and arguments delivered without even the most basic understanding of theology. The average vocal internet atheist does not know what the word "exegesis" means, but he is so full of himself and so full of vices that come from his nihilistic worldview he has no problem debating with people about the most significant issues in life as if they were trading warez on irc.

In contrast, most of the religious people I know are married, are not drug users, give and serve and help others, and while there is a diversity of intellectual knowledge, most Christians have a sense of humility and responsibility to not really get into things they don't know much about (not all the time).

You can say a lot of words about Christian morality, but if you want to prove it to me, show me one atheist who is a decent human being, who doesn't watch porn and tell Christians they are anti-feminist, who doesn't lie, ever, who has some sense of regularity to his life that flows out of a carefully considered walk in which being a good person is most important of all. I will show you 10 atheists who think being a good person is the same as being smart.

I see that you guys are debating whether pedofilia is ok on this forum. There is your proof: Christians are way behind. You need to look to the future.