Is There a Point To Living a Moral Life?

[Mister Agenda]

You could say evolution as atheism understands it was a purposeless byproduct of an unintentionally created universe.

What's your point?

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Secular Humanist morality is ripped from Christian/religious morality anyway seeing as you have nothing of your own. If you wanted to apply a rational scientific or an evolutionary based moral system it's already been tried before and it failed in horror.

You have it backwards. Christianity haltingly, taking a step back for every two steps forward, inches toward humanist morality, ever dragging its feet and claiming whatever injustice the culture in which they are embedded is moving away from is ordained by God. They can never catch up because their belief system is entirely composed of brakes on progress.
Too uneducated to know the difference between communism and humanism, I take it. You lot never dare face humanism on its own terms, because of all the blood on your collective hands you know you can't take on a moral philosophy like humanism without smearing it. There has never been a genocide because people cared too much for their fellows or were too undogmatic or too reasonable or valued human dignity too much. You can't cite any great humanist massacres or purges or secret police activities because there haven't been any. You can pretend there have been, though, and that's close enough for someone like you, apparently.

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How about the thing called "conscience"?

As a by-product of evolution conscience would be no different than any other animal’s instinctual behavior, like bird migration. If conscience is an accidental feature of our species then it is not a reliable guide for ethical behavior.

Conscience actually is not a reliable guide for ethical behavior. It is a motivator to adhere to whatever morality you have absorbed from your lessons and experience. There were Nazis who felt guilty about not being diligent enough about killing Jews. Without conscience, we have little impetus to follow any morality, so it is crucial, but it is not the source of our morality.

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To avoid the equivocation between conscience and instinct, you need not consider conscience an evolved instinct, per se, even if the means by which it appeared is evolutionary. You could say that it is a product of Man’s capacity to reason.

 It's an instinct to adhere to the values learned from parents and society or later derived by reason or insight.

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This affords various solutions like enlightened self-interest, tit-for-tat, the “golden rule”, social contract theory, etc.
The problem is that you have started a regress that needs a termination point.

 Your discomfort with not having a termination point doesn't mean one is needed for any practical purpose. 

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By making reason the evolutionary by-product from which conscience gets its force, you must likewise explain how reason, itself being an accidental feature is reliable.

 Why do we need to explain how something is reliable if we can observe that it is reliable? It's nice if we can, of course, but it would be stupid to throw it out if the reason for its reliableness was unknown.I don't know why causality won't stop working tomorrow, but it would be very foolish to base any plans on reality so doing.

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By making reason the evolutionary by-product from which conscience gets its force, you must likewise explain how reason, itself being an accidental feature is reliable. First, you could say that the efficacy of reason is axiomatic. While I agree this presupposition is needed, the fact that you can reason at all is itself in need of an explanation. The required explanation forces the regress further back into the deeper prior causes.

The efficacy of reason is observable. No presupposition needed. You're making up a problem to claim that we can't solve it.

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The efficacy of reason presupposes that you live in a world with inherit rational order. This appears to be the case.

Which is exactly what makes it an observation, not a presuppostion.

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Now either the rational order of the world is essential, a brute fact, or it is accidental, a contingent feature. In my estimation, the four fundamental forces and handful of known constants have all the characteristics of accidental attributes. First you can imagine a world with more or fewer forces and one in which the constants have different values, or even change within this universe. Second, even if the universe did indeed come “out of nothing” on its own, then so also must its physical laws come with it “out of nothing.” In this scenario, the secular response to “out of nothing, nothing comes” amounts to “out of absurdity, something comes.” Any morality that, at root, derives from absurdity is really no morality at all.
So the de-nihilists, atheists who deny that they are nihilists, must, if they are to be taken seriously, show that their favored ethical system is ultimately supported by something other than pure chance.

Not based on the travesty of logic you are trying to foist on us. What a mess! Thinking like yours is one of the things that convinced me that believing in God is not worth what an otherwise intelligent person has to do to their own mind in the attempt to justify their belief.

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Atheism is merely the "off" position on the issue of any god existing.

If something has an on off switch then to use it properly for the function it was intended it must be turned on.

Ah! Our old friend sophistry!

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Someone in authority must have told them to turn it off so they did.

'Must', eh? Because your imagination is too limited to conceive of any alternate explanations, I must suppose.
More likely, no one in authority told them to turn it on in the first place. If you're into prosyletization, these are the atheists you want to target, the ones who have never thought much about whether God is real or not, criteria for justifiable belief, critical thinking, logic, reason, or science.

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You do know that most of the major scientific discoveries in history were made by theists?

That seems to have dropped off considerably along with the power of the church and church-dominated society to impose unpleasant consequences on nonbelievers.

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Because of the vast complexity of natural events.

A vast complexity of natural events happen because? Keep going until you get the answer.

Asked and answered. Shit happens because there is no reason for it to not so do. You now seem to be insinuating a new question. Please be explicit.

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And still going with telling other people about their beliefs. Why do you need to do this so much?

They have to do it because their religion requires non-believers to fit a certain stereotype.  To accept that people simply rationally dismiss their claims is to accept their claims as false.

Or at least possibly false.

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No. No.

This is the most fucking horrible part of your religion, the way it steals all the good parts of humanity

Christ is  the good part of humanity no-one stole him. You don't believe in God though so all of what we consider good in humanity has to be evolutionary instinct and neurological survival hardwiring, I appreciate that. You don't base your moral values on this so called fact of life though, good thing you don't.

And reason, and experience, and thousands of practical experiments with different kinds of societies over thousands of years. And most of the philosophical heavy lifting was done before the advent of the Christian era. But keep over-simplifying our positions and putting your speculations in our mouths, I imagine it's much easier than bothering to learn what we think, especially if your intellectual integrity isn't a consideration.

[Mister Agenda]

We share the exact same morality. Atheists are keen to point this out and  try claim credit for it ignoring that much of this moral progress was spearhead by deeply religiously motivated people who valued people as God creatures and the world as his creation. If the world is as you think it is then we should care about what exactly? Making ourselves comfortable as possible before we die and are dissolved back into the uncaring cosmos? Of course atheists don't think this way but why? I'd say it's because there is more there than you claim there to be.

Much of this morality was spear-headed by Quakers. If you're a Quaker, I'm willing to give you some props for your tribe's historical contributions to ending slavery. Much of the resistance to ending slavery was spear-headed by other Christians. When it's pretty much all Christians on both sides, it's pretty meaningless to crow about it being a Christian accomplishment. 

 If you're some other denomination, there you go, taking credit for something done by people you don't agree with enough to belong to their denomination. Not to mention ignoriing the contribution of rationalist Enlightenment thinkers of the time who criticized slavery for violating the natural rights of men.

If the world is as we think it is, why shouldn't we care about it? The universe doesn't care about us, but we care about it and we care about each other. We're the only kinds of things capable of caring about anything. Caring about stuff is part of our nature. Barring mental problems it is pretty much impossible not to care about something. As a fellow human, this shouldn't mystify you.

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Ready, fire, aim. Esq you must have skipped my post. Apparently Chas only read the last sentence. Evolution is not a complete solution.

Please point us to the law that says everything must have a complete solution.

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Evolution is not random chance.
It is natural selection.

And mutations come from where? You must support intelligent design.

I don't believe you're really this stupid. Mutations are somewhat random, within rather narrow physical constraints. Natural selection is what imposes order and function on reproducing organisms by imposing addtional constraints on mutations, namely that they must not reduce the chances of the organism that has them of successfully reproducing. It's a sorting process that could be said to be intelligent in the way an algorithm could be said to be intelligent, but does not involve conscious design. I don't believe that you're really so ignorant as to think that what downbeatplumb described really is so-called 'intelligent design'. Which just leaves the obvious alternative that you are wanking off on us.

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 I necroposted ...dunno what to do to take it back other than delete it...

And I got caught in it. Apologies, everyone.

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Don't know if you noticed how old those quotes are....

I did not, and I was on such a roll, too!

[loganonekenobi]

What makes us moral to each other has already been stated. The golden rule is by no means associated only with the Christian god. Any one with any intellictual facilities should be able to see that treating others with respect is a better approach that not most of the time. Evil people will be evil no matter what god is currently worshiped or not. If fear is the only motivation to be a "good" person then maturity has not been reached. It was only in child hood that I needed the fear of punishment to be good. Now I am an adult and I can see the wisdom of "good over bad" actions with out fear of reprisal.
For example (and i will be horrificly blunt): I want a certain woman that i see but she doesn't want me. My options are to leave here be or abduct and rape her. Even if i didn't have to worry about jail time the truth is that once I did that she would be damaged forever. Her children would grow up learning fear of the world (especialy old guys like me). She might not reach her potential as a person thus lessening the good she could have done the world. In all it tends to break down the comfort and security that the basic unit of society needs to thrive and all because I wanted an hour of selfish pleasure.
I'm not a gueinus but even I can figure out all of this and understand why we should be moral. I don't need a god to explain that to me not that God was ever againts rape.
That's not even mentioning our empathy an somewhat normal humans (not sociopaths). If I hurt someone who hasn't hurt me then I hurt. If I make them feel well/happy then i feel that too.

[Cato]

The golden rule is by no means associated only with the Christian god.  

Who is associated with the no necropost rule?

[Excited Penguin]

The OP is retarded. I take deep offense at what he is implying about atheists.
There are illegal and legal things to do.
Morals only come into it when it comes to changing law. We shouldn't be concerned with morals so much, otherwise, in our daily lives, given that we are not living in an anarchy. Were it so, every man for himself, this question would have been interesting. As it is though, it is not.

[loganonekenobi]

The golden rule is by no means associated only with the Christian god.  

Who is associated with the no necropost rule?  

If I am guilty of necro posting It is only because I don't fully understand what that is. I even looked it up but still made no sence to me.

[Cato]

Who is associated with the no necropost rule?  

If I am guilty  of necro posting It is only because I don't fully understand what that is.  I even looked it up but still made no sence to me.

Posting to a thread that hasn't had any activity for more than 30 days. There used to be red letters at the top of the page warning that a user was about to do this. I'm assuming this survived migration.

[robvalue]

It's posting in threads where there has been no activity for 30+ days. It's not against the rules, but it's generally discouraged.

I tend to use the "today's post" button at the top rather than go through the subsections, to see what is current.

[Whateverist]

Apparently, once the hymen on the corpse has been penetrated the red lettering goes away and it becomes a free for all for sloppy seconds.

The OP is retarded. I take deep offense at what he is implying about atheists.

That is why he posts here. Please don't feed the troll.

[Mudhammam]

Christian - I'm moral because it's my best chance of acquiring fulfilment and reward in heaven!

Atheist - I'm moral because it's my best chance of acquiring fulfillment and reward in life and posterity.

What don't believers understand?