Replacing Religious Morality

[Zazzy]

I agree with P1, sort of. Whatever metric you want to be happy, go for it. Although, in the end, it doesn't matter. I've always been fascinated with Atheists trying to break down theists arguments. I get wanting to avoid the oppressiveness of theologians, but otherwise, we know it doesn't really matter. There is no scorecard. If you are lucky enough to believe in a God that is looking out for you, more power to you. I'll be here in the corner terrified of ceasing to exist.

I'll be with you in that corner- it bugs that shit out of me that one day, I won't be. What saves me is the knowledge that I won't know it when I don't exist.

P2 doesn't follow. It, again, is based on universal truths rather than the fact only individual truths exist. The idea is that all men are created equal, and should be treated as such.

I'm not saying all men are created equal. They clearly aren't. What all men- all humans- have is this one life. That's all we've got in common- one shot at existence. It doesn't make everyone equal, but it is a sobering thought, far more sobering than any theistic notion of morality or fairness, because whatever I do to someone in a theistic universe won't matter TO THEM in the long run.

The reality, I think, is that men have no value to even compare. There is no metric. We apply whatever subjective values to whatever we want. I give myself very high importance in my own personal system, and most other people rate very close to 0. But they are all make believe numbers that only exist because I think them.

True, which is why you have to choose your moral guidelines. You can be a rapist or a murderer if you can get away with it. Is that what you want? Or would you rather be a productive member of a thriving society? In the world as it actually is, YOU choose your moral code. If mine doesn't work for you, that's OK. Find something else- or don't and be amoral. It really is up to you.

[Raven]

Empathy is something which anyone who is not clinically antisocial possesses. It is not a religion, it is not a tool. We all have it. You can call it an emotional response if you like. But it is neither a religion or a tool.

Now, you can make a very good case for religion being a tool to control the masses. The government can get you in this life, but God can get you for eternity. That might be just the thing to scare some folks into behaving. You can dodge the authorities, but God knows what you did, so he'll get you in the end.

What I don't get is what the hell is it that you want? Is dropping a religious overseer too much to deal with or something? Just enjoy making your own mind up about what is important to you, and what your values are, not Rome's. What's so fucking hard about that? Those bozos in dog collars deal in absolutes, nobody else does. What is it wallym values and thinks is important? That's what matters. I don't get it, dude. I really don't

[henryp]

Empathy is something which anyone who is not clinically antisocial possesses. It is not a religion, it is not a tool. We all have it. You can call it an emotional response if you like. But it is neither a religion or a tool.

Now, you can make a very good case for religion being a tool to control the masses. The government can get you in this life, but God can get you for eternity. That might be just the thing to scare some folks into behaving. You can dodge the authorities, but God knows what you did, so he'll get you in the end.

What I don't get is what the hell is it that you want? Is dropping a religious overseer too much to deal with or something? Just enjoy making your own mind up about what is important to you, and what your values are, not Rome's. What's so fucking hard about that? Those bozos in dog collars deal in absolutes, nobody else does. What is it wallym values and thinks is important? That's what matters. I don't get it, dude. I really don't

I think empathy is an erratic easily manipulated emotional response. Politicians, religion, businesses, advertising, Sally Struthers, those sad dog commercials, etc... They all manipulate the emotional response to get people to behave how they want.

As for 'what the hell I want', I'm just curious how other atheists operate. This is my first time interacting with a group of atheists. I wondered if there were people who had more than some empathy at the foundation of their belief system. It looks like that's the fairly accepted substitute.

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True, which is why you have to choose your moral guidelines. You can be a rapist or a murderer if you can get away with it. Is that what you want? Or would you rather be a productive member of a thriving society? In the world as it actually is, YOU choose your moral code. If mine doesn't work for you, that's OK. Find something else- or don't and be amoral. It really is up to you.

I think the problem I'm getting caught up on, is picking a moral code based on logic. It seems like that's how a lot of us got here. The logical absurdity of religion was offputting. And to replace it with my own made up illogical moral code just seems depressing.

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I'll slow down now. Thanks for the input. I'm sure the discussion has been had about a 1000 times on here already.

[max-greece]

I'm fairly new to atheism, coming from a few decades of Catholicism. I gave up on the belief in God based on an All-loving God and eternal damnation being unable to rationally coexist.

I suspect it's a bit of a backwards way of becoming an atheist. I had been of the CS Lewis school of believing that the only way to create an objective set of moral laws was to work from a few truths that are necessary for those laws to exist and work my way back to some higher power. Murder is wrong. How do you make that an objective statement. You assign intrinsic value to the individual humans. Where could that type of worth come from. An all-powerful being could be a source of that.

The catch now, is that by crossing off the higher power, I've essentially ended up discounting my views on morality.

So my question is, what fits in it's place.

The answer I've heard in general is 'empathy empathy empathy.' But I'm a little confused as to what makes empathy so special. It is, afterall, just an emotional reaction. What sets it apart from rage, lust, jealousy, etc...

The idea of 'I wouldn't like it if you stole my stuff so I won't steal yours' operates in such a narrow spectrum of reason. The flaws being that if I have no stuff, there is no threat to having my stuff stolen. Or if I'm powerful enough that you can't steal my stuff, then I can steal your stuff.

I suspect this is why we see 'accepted' morality go out the window as we venture further away from comfortable middle class types. Similarly, you remove the threat of lawful punishment, and it becomes open season. Streaming copyrighted video certainly isn't causing any empathy problems.

The easier (and more prevalent unfortunately) answer seems to just be nice, because being nice is nice. And don't put much thought into why. We could probably chalk it up to evolution. We've evolved into ants who follow rules because it's for the good of the nest. And as long as we don't put to much thought into it, I suppose that's enough. But we are a thoughtful species, theoretically. We can see that we've been trained to act out of our own best individual interests. And rational thinking is supposed to be what kept us from just going along and buying into the God story to begin with.

Are we just smart enough to not know there is a God, and then just replace him with feelings that were more or less imposed upon us by a few thousand years of religious dominated rule.

Interested to see what the answers to this are. During my time on the other side of this discussion, I always felt when atheists were pressed on what they believe, they quickly became uncomfortable, and tried to shift things back to why religion was stupid. Now that I've 'switched sides' there is no religious nonsense to get in the way.

First off - welcome to the forums.

Secondly - to properly reply to this is going to take either a very long post or a whole series of smaller ones.

I'll kick off with a couple of things and we can see how we go:

1. Your background is written large in your post. Your religion has ingrained in you the idea that people are in essence bad. This is simply not the case. People are a broad spectrum. Some are naturally "good" and some "bad." Now when I use terms like good and bad I am using in the sense that an onlooker might view our behaviour.

2. Again due to your background you are looking for a single primary cause of morality - it comes from here, or it comes from there. This is probably not the case - there are a whole host of potential factors determining our behaviour ranging from inherited traits to upbringing to mood and probably a dozen more. Empathy plays a role for certain as does conscience.

Now having established those 2 points I want to raise another issue. We tend to take morality as a single mass. We lump in our tendency not to commit murder with the act of returning a $10 bill to the man in front of us that just dropped it out of his pocket.

Whilst this is all essentially under the banner of morality it is not a stretch to think that the extremes come from very different places.

Taking the whole of morality, therefore, in all of its complexity and then attempting to explain it against the incredible complexity of society is probably all but impossible without writing your very own library.

For me it is easier to take things right back to basics - going back even before the birth of the hunter gatherer groups all the way back to instinctive behaviour (which we still exhibit) and then slowly overlaying morality as the groupings and societies get more complicated.

As an underlying fundament therefore I'd say we are social creatures that rely on team work to survive as a species. The same can be said for a pride of lions. Female lions work as a team to bring down game. One lion does not take advantage of another and kill it during the attack when that lion's flank is vulnerable. Their instinct to work together overcomes their killing instinct. I don't imagine lions have morality.

Early hominids probably worked much the same way. As their brains evolved so did the complexity of the rules and simple morality formed as an adjunct to instinct. Empathy probably came about sometime around this point - its a handy tool.

From there on in - ever increasing complexity of society went hand in hand with more complex morality.

I'll stop there for now - this is getting too long but we can continue to take it however far you want to.

[Ryantology]

We know these rules make sense for people invested in society. What religion (and things like it) does is make these rules make sense for people who aren't invested in society.

The effectiveness of this really depends on how much any kind of rules matter to a person who has no interest in the society around them.

When a person decides to kill themselves, they no longer are invested in society, for example. So if they feel like killing a bunch of other people first, there's no reason for them not to. God saying no killing is an absolute. The social contract only exists for people who want to remain in the social contract.

The problem here is that a person who has decided to kill him/herself has already decided to disregard one of God's rules, because suicide is definitely a no-no in Christianity. If that rule means nothing to a person, why would we expect any of the other rules to matter to them?

The other problem is that the Bible doesn't present "no killing" as an absolute. Depending on how one wishes to interpret the Old Testament (and there is definitely no clear guideline on how to do that), a person who wishes to kill has plenty of justification if they want it.

I have no god to answer to, yet my stance on killing other people is much closer to absolute than God's: only in immediate defense of your life, or someone else's life, or if a person wishes to die. To me, no other intentional killing is acceptable at all. I certainly do not condone the killing of witches or homosexuals or people who don't share my lack of religion.

Morals are an evolutionary development. But poor people and powerful people tend to be able to dodge them, because they aren't as invested in the contract.

This statement assumes an objective moral standard, though. I don't think there are that many truly amoral people out there.

[Zazzy]

I think the problem I'm getting caught up on, is picking a moral code based on logic. It seems like that's how a lot of us got here. The logical absurdity of religion was offputting. And to replace it with my own made up illogical moral code just seems depressing.

Look at it this way: you have spent your life accepting a made-up, illogical moral code that somebody else decreed. That seems depressing. You are a primate, and primate species need to live with a group. To live with a group, you have to temper impulses to fuck with other members of the group. To that end, evolution has equipped you with a conscience and a sense of altruism, and the group nurtures and rewards behavior resulting from conscience and altruism. Different groups accept different standards of morality- in some cultures it is moral to stone your philandering wife, or to eat your dead. The group decides on general rules, and you decide whether or not to obey them, although for most neurologically normal people it is not difficult to overcome desires to commit really heinous acts like murder. If you want a biological basis- that's all she wrote. And these (biological reasons + cultural indoctrination) are good reasons to develop a moral code- better reasons than simply accepting a code of morals from an old book, many of which may do nothing to promote the welfare or happiness of the group. I'm pretty sure you DO want to be a productive member of a thriving society instead of a rapist/murderer. Why is that? Is it because of your religious teachings, or because of your neurological wiring and cultural upbringing?

I'll slow down now. Thanks for the input. I'm sure the discussion has been had about a 1000 times on here already.

It remains a useful conversation to me, at least.

[henryp]

Look at it this way: you have spent your life accepting a made-up, illogical moral code that somebody else decreed. That seems depressing. You are a primate, and primate species need to live with a group. To live with a group, you have to temper impulses to fuck with other members of the group. To that end, evolution has equipped you with a conscience and a sense of altruism, and the group nurtures and rewards behavior resulting from conscience and altruism. Different groups accept different standards of morality- in some cultures it is moral to stone your philandering wife, or to eat your dead. The group decides on general rules, and you decide whether or not to obey them, although for most neurologically normal people it is not difficult to overcome desires to commit really heinous acts like murder. If you want a biological basis- that's all she wrote. And these (biological reasons + cultural indoctrination) are good reasons to develop a moral code- better reasons than simply accepting a code of morals from an old book, many of which may do nothing to promote the welfare or happiness of the group. I'm pretty sure you DO want to be a productive member of a thriving society instead of a rapist/murderer. Why is that? Is it because of your religious teachings, or because of your neurological wiring and cultural upbringing?

1) I don't think the Religious moral code is particularly illogical. The premise is illogical. The idea of God is dumb, in hindsight. But if there was a God, and he said all humans have value, then mimicking much of Jesus' teachings, particularly in regards to treating each other nicely, acting selflessly, etc...follows very logically.

2) Are biological reasons and cultural indoctrination good reasons for stuff? Biological reasons and culturual indoctrinations are why I was religious to begin with. Scared of death. Looking for meaning. Mommy told me God was real. As a human, I have enough self-awareness to shake many of the controls that are being imposed upon me.

In a cozy middle class american existence, there's no way I could be or would want to be a rapist/murderer. In my situation, there's only so much I can stop believing. Decades of being taught one thing, with millenium of societal pressures backing it up are pretty oppressive. Even if I knew it was stupid, much of it will be a trumping influence whether I want it to or not. But that's a flaw I should work on.

Stealing? Sure. I'll stream the hell out of anything I can. Why? Because there are no threats of punishment. I've given up worrying about charity. I don't worry about people I don't know's welfare, particularly if it has no impact on me.

I think sometimes we're so in the middle of the Hobbes social contract that we mistake the contract for something more. But, as I've said before, what about people outside it? You go to 80's(?) Uganda, and they've got different rules. I think we'd be less inclined to tell them their cultural wiring and neurological impulses are a good guide for their behavior as they are raping and murdering everything in sight.

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What I'm working with right now, is operating on the absolutes I have. I know my own impulses. People who I care about, I care about. Things I enjoy, I enjoy. And that's about as far as I've gotten. Although, to be fair to myself, I stripped away a lot of garbage to arrive at the point I'm at now. But I'm still trying to form political and world views that are rational based on my new value system, which, for me, has been a pretty complicated process.

[Simon Moon]

I think that's the intuitive answer. But I don't think reality reflects that. When you start saying preferable, that implies some metric is being used to measure things. The kid doesn't want to die in Africa because he values living, lets say. The problem is that his living being valuable is not an absolute. It's a subjective value some people hold, and some people don't.

There is a metric. It is based on the fact that we all live in the same physical world, subject to the same physical laws. I have no trouble understanding that since I want to continue living a comfortable life, that others probably feel the same way. This is confirmed by the vast majority of people behaving in such a way that seems to demonstrate this.

Who says that the value for living has to be absolute? We value it as individuals because that is our evolutionary makeup. It is valuable to us, because we're the ones placing the value on life.

If we did not have the evolutionary makeup to value living, we would have died out as a species millions of years ago. Only species that value life over death survive.

The example I'm growing fond of is "If the world exploded on Tuesday, who would care on Wednesday?" The answer is nobody. Our entire existence would no longer matter in any way, because there is no absolute meaning.

Exactly!

The universe does not care about our existence. We are the only ones that value our existence because we value our existence.

Sorry about the tautology, but it is demonstrably true.

So individually, we tend to prefer health/living, but that's mostly for us and those who we have attached value to. Your dog gets hit by a car, you shed tears. 1000's of phillipinos die in a typhoon, you watch a video on CNN and think "that'd suck" and move on with your day.

I may not have the same emotional attachment, but that does not mean I don't feel appalled that 1000's of people lost the one and only life they had.

What does religion offer? The false belief that they are in a 'better place'.

[henryp]

The thing is, there's a tangible measurement. We can measure it by our choices.

I'd feed myself before I fed my dog. That's a real thing. I prefer my well-being over that of a dog.

People choose to feed their dogs over feeding sad little starving African kids. Because our dogs have more value to us.

Is that not evidence that your 'we're one big species in this together' is overrated? Most of us tangibly choose non-humans welfare over humans we aren't connected to.

And it doesn't stop there. We choose a lot of things more questionable than the welfare of a dog over other humans. Inanimate objects that bring us a bit of joy tend to be more valuable to us than other humans.

All things being equal, sure, we'd prefer those 1000's of people in the Phillipines not die. But I think reality shows that it's VERY inconsequential at most to us?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Amazing how clever de-nihilists can be trying to justify morality within an indifferent amoral materiel universe. Although it has been fun reading your little circle jerk.