As a nonreligious person, where do you get your moral guidance?

[arewethereyet]

Administrator Notice
Removed serious tag, OP is long gone and this thread has veered from being 'serious'. Carry on.

[Objectivist]

Even though this is a loaded question, I'll answer it.  The same place I get almost all of my knowledge:  induction, logic applied to observed facts.

Here's hoping you don't get it from the place your name implies, because Ayn Rand is a truly awful moral guide.

I've said where I get it from.  Knowledge does not come from other people.  Knowledge comes from Observing reality.

[h4ym4n]

I get my morals from the god that rapes and impregnates young virgins and has a hissy fit and kills everything on earth except a drunk and his family who enjoys incest.

[Thumpalumpacus]

It was only through insightful hypothesizing and assiduous experimentation, rigorously applying the scientific method, that we ascertained that stuff like stabbing someone in the eye with a pitchfork was not really copacetic.

Yes.  Always use a turkey baster.

I took part in the ball-peen hammer phase of the trials. It turns out that you can't really stab someone with a hammer ... but you can kill them in the effort.

[Gwaithmir]

Actually my morality comes from Final Fantasy.

No, it doesn't. No one's does. 

[Ahriman]

Actually my morality comes from Final Fantasy.

No, it doesn't. No one's does. 

A fantasy that is final, is cause for celebration. I will adopt it as morality without hesitation.

[Uberpod]

Where do religious people go for moral guidance? Consult a meager incomplete and contradictory text or a person who says they understand such a text. This is a no better circumstance than it is for nonreligious person. Pretend access to an absolute authority is no better than no access at all, and in some cases the pretend certitude makes matters worse.

[The Grand Nudger]

If religious people actually consulted their magic books or their traditional hardlining shamans for moral guidance, then their religions would not be changing to fit society in every generation. They don't, and never have. Religious texts and traditions are a memorialization of a moral view-in-time. Not generative, in any sense, for anyone, ever.

A few pages back someone mentioned that it's a fair bet people's ideas about how to treat other people predated religion, and that certainly seems to be the case in a very important way that ties in directly with why we maintain texts and traditions like that. Ritual burial is an expression of value in the dead, which, by extension, offers us value in life, even if (and especially when) the worst or the inevitable occurs. It's because we already felt a certain way about people, and about ourselves, that we decided to dress the graves of the departed, or engage in little ceremonies, or attend to a specific set of actions. To this day, religion grounds itself in death, often to the exclusion or in explicit rejection of life. We started doing this before full modernity, and certainly before any religion as we would understand them today, though, from an academic standpoint, this is the earliest evidence of a religion of any kind. That people are sacred, even or especially the dead, and that it is taboo to deface them. In extension, so too are those dead peoples possessions, and even their ideas. There are lots of hypothesis about why we might feel this way, I'm sure the idea that we do this as a sort of selection mechanism ala "well, bob and bobs ideas got us this far, so we should stick with them" - but I think that implies a level of cold calculation not exactly in evidence in human response to death. In grief. In the rejection of loss any way we might manage it. I think it is and was always more personal and emotional than that. That, to me, is the really fun and fascinating bit - knowing that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, people 100k years ago or possibly even more, despite their being different from fully modern people in a great many ways, were exactly like us in at least one regard.

[Angrboda]

That's ignoring that the shamans are doing changing as well.

[The Grand Nudger]

Part and parcel of the same, I'd imagine? They change just like anyone else, same effect on their religious beliefs. I guess we might wonder if there's an extra serving of self delusion in their case, with a magic book as a prop for the assertion of their own moral apprehensions. At least if or when they've managed to convince themselves that they're passive communicators of the truth of the page rather than leveraging misguided deference and respect for object and station in their gullible flocks.