Do Athiests have morals?

[Augustus]

While I don't think there's any kind of objective morality at all, scientific or otherwise, the fact that it reveals uncomfortable truths has nothing to do with them being truths. Truth is truth, regardless of how it makes people feel and should be dealt with as truth, not rejected because it doesn't make us feel good.

Was just a point that most people searching for an objective morality assume it must be good and knowledge of it will be better than basing morality on Religion and post-religious values.

As a hypothetical, if it revealed that the Nazis had it right, shouldn't we reject it and live with a fiction instead?

 

[LuisDantas]

Was just a point that most people searching for an objective morality assume it must be good and knowledge of it will be better than basing morality on Religion and post-religious values.

I don't think that to be the case, for what it is worth. Morality is based on post-religious (or pre-religious) values far as I can tell.

As a hypothetical, if it revealed that the Nazis had it right, shouldn't we reject it and live with a fiction instead?

Of course, but that amounts to saying that the Nazis could not have it right, at least when confronted with our current levels of discernment and reason.

 

[Cephus]

Was just a point that most people searching for an objective morality assume it must be good and knowledge of it will be better than basing morality on Religion and post-religious values.

As a hypothetical, if it revealed that the Nazis had it right, shouldn't we reject it and live with a fiction instead?

It depends on how you're measuring "right" and "wrong". I really can't imagine any situation where those words have any objective meaning in this situation. If it turns out that the Jews are inferior to the Aryans, and again, how do you measure inferiority, then no, we should accept objective fact no matter how it makes us feel. Of course, I still can't figure out how the Nazis would have been "right" in any of this so it's really academic.

 

[1robin]

Actually this is a huge misrepresentation of the facts. The human population is far greater now than it ever has been before for example and there are several mass killings. The most prominent of which was under the Soviets. But we also had WWI, WWII, Holocaust, Korean War ect. Our ability to kill each other because of advanced technology and two corrupted countries have killed more people.

I liked the other avatar better.

Ok, What is a huge misrepresentation of the facts? What Nietzsche said?

What I said in connection with Nietzsche is a fact. However if you mean that the numbers who have been killed in the 20th century are coincidental to the rise of secularism then I can see why you might think so but it is not so simple. I make this argument and every once in a while I get similar responses saying that we have greater weapons than we used to. True but that would make it all the more horrific to have used them and used them to the extent possible. If you mean there are simple more target alive today then would not make it even more deplorable to have killed such a large number of them. While we in some part can and in some ways cannot chalk up causalities as simply technological advance, we cannot chalk up the willingness to use them at whatever pace we possibly can to technology. We can blame Oppenheim for the atomic bomb but we cannot blame him for our dropping every gram of fissionable material we could possibly produce on two civilian targets (that is not to say it was not forced upon us in a way but it is still morally questionable), Hitler was not killing people by the millions in camps because of technology (he found the cheapest and simplest mean possible. It was also not primarily because there were more people that 50 million were killed. It was because the most educated and advanced nations on earth for the first time systematically target civilian centers. Others did it in isolated instances, only we have done it as a primary tool of total war. It takes an evil person to shoot the one guy who lives next to him. It takes a whole other order of evil magnitude to shoot the thousand people in his entire building. But death tolls in wars is not even the tip of the ice burg. I admit my statistic only came from the US as that is where I live , it is a very multicultural nation, and it has a very clear demarcation between Christian politics and secular politics. Virtually every moral statistic you can find shown a sharp decline beginning in the late 50's or there about. Some of them have increase by several hundred percent's. I have posted hundreds of theses stats and linked to thousands of them. That is an exercise I do care to repeat again. I am too lazy and it is too depressing. I am sure they can easily be searched for if necessary.

By the numbers secularism says exactly the opposite of what you say. The number of killings and crime decrease almost inversely to the amount of religiosity. So there isn't any actual evidence for deteriorated Christian influence (as I am sure you mean Christianity when you say religion) linking to a lack of moral conviction. All evidence seems opposite that.

Maybe the rest of Earth behaves inversely as the US does (in that case the rest of the world would be 15 trillion on the positive side of zero in the debt category) but I doubt it. As far as I know the US is a good approximate for the world in general and I have done enough comparisons to at least satisfy myself and the picture is exactly what I painted above.

Let me add some things you may or may not even be aware of.

1. Despite having the power to annihilate all life as we know it. We have almost done so, TWICE. Once you may be familiar with in the Cuban missile crisis but most non-military folks don't know we came much closer in the 80's. I am not exaggerating when I say the existence of all life depended on one lowly technician who was not even supposed to be at work. He was asked by Gorbechev whether he thought it was a sun spot or a launch he saw in the satellite image. In those days you had to launch the missiles early because it took forever to fuel them. If he said launch we would not exist, he had no idea but gambled on sun flare.
2. If someone asked me 50 years ago what we could do in the future that would have been so terrible that it would unmistakably indicate moral insanity. I would have said to kill our children on an industrial scale. Killing our young in the womb Has killed more people in the 20th century than the wars have in several or more.
3. Another way that secularism is not the cause but only exacerbates the issues is by waging some weird kind of quasi war against truth. Abortion which is death by preference is somehow called sacred women's rights, though it denies those same rights to the unborn, it for some reason can't seem to say the words Islamic Terrorist (kind of hard to defeat an enemy that is not an enemy until you die), and militant secularism has sought to eradicate faith in the worst string of genocides in history per time span.

I could go on and on and on, and while I feel you are sincere I think your emotional commitment here just will not allow any of these facts to go unmolested. I am not sure when it comes to you specifically but to me the most horrific act in human history has been what the left (usually secular) has done to truth. It is a war so effectively waged against truth that it would admirable if not so costly. Again that is not aimed at you but a mind set that is currently destroying a nation others built with blood greater than any other on earth until they took control of politics.

Anyway I understood exactly what you were trying to say but I think the willingness to kill a hundred people more horrific than to kill just one no matter how many exist. Even if you thought you were right would you not be more resistant to pulling a trigger that might kill 100,000 than 10. I would hope so.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Anyway I understood exactly what you were trying to say but I think the willingness to kill a hundred people more horrific than to kill just one no matter how many exist. Even if you thought you were right would you not be more resistant to pulling a trigger that might kill 100,000 than 10. I would hope so.

Statistics says one is more likely to have died a violent death in the 20th century, than in the middle ages.

But your whole argumentation of "objective moral truth" is deceptive, since very clearly religion is overwhelmingly focused on faith, and faith is a form of subjectivity not objectivity. There are different meanings to the word objective which may suit your argumentation, but to argue that very science minded secularists are not focusing on objectivity enough, is to make a fundamental confusion of objectivity with whatever meaning of objectivity you are using.

 

[Augustus]

Actually this is a huge misrepresentation of the facts. The human population is far greater now than it ever has been before for example and there are several mass killings. The most prominent of which was under the Soviets. But we also had WWI, WWII, Holocaust, Korean War ect. Our ability to kill each other because of advanced technology and two corrupted countries have killed more people.

By the numbers secularism says exactly the opposite of what you say. The number of killings and crime decrease almost inversely to the amount of religiosity. So there isn't any actual evidence for deteriorated Christian influence (as I am sure you mean Christianity when you say religion) linking to a lack of moral conviction. All evidence seems opposite that.

What statistics do you have that show secularism is related to lower numbers of killings? Find that hard to believe simply because of the enormous numbers killed by the communists particularly. I don't see how these could have been rebalanced.

One major problem I think is the end of the values that remained from codes of chivalry in warfare. The extent that these were based on religious values I don't know, maybe someone else has an opinion on this, but total war was made possible by their decline. The rationalisation of warfare was certainly a nasty phenomenon in the 20th C though.

 

[1robin]

Statistics says one is more likely to have died a violent death in the 20th century, than in the middle ages.

Even though I was arguing a point that would have made it true it is still surprising to learn.

But your whole argumentation of "objective moral truth" is deceptive, since very clearly religion is overwhelmingly focused on faith, and faith is a form of subjectivity not objectivity. There are different meanings to the word objective which may suit your argumentation, but to argue that very science minded secularists are not focusing on objectivity enough, is to make a fundamental confusion of objectivity with whatever meaning of objectivity you are using.

My comments are made in a moral context. The exception to that was a very specific claim. Someone suggested a standard by which all knowledge except the fact that we think unknowable. I have a hard time getting non-theists to first adopt a consistent criteria to use in all claims, and second to select one that is commonly used. They usually use the if it is not a universal certainty it can't be true of a religion but if a few data points and scientists agree then it is true of science. I normally grant common standard for scientific claims (I have a degree in math) and accept most of science but the person I was talking with did not grant them so I used their standards against science to show the flaw. Since this thread is about morality and since your new to me I will repost the best definition concerning subjective and objective morality I have ever heard of and which are commonly used in debate.

The first is for objective morality and can only be true if God exists.

Malum in se (plural mala in se) is a Latin phrase meaning wrong or evil in itself. The phrase is used to refer to conduct assessed as sinful or inherently wrong by nature, independent of regulations governing the conduct.
Malum in se - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The second is for subjective morality and is all that is available without God.

Malum prohibitum (plural mala prohibita, literal translation: "wrong [as or because] prohibited") is a Latin phrase used in law to refer to conduct that constitutes an unlawful act only by virtue of statute,
Malum prohibitum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

While it was Latin these were originally defined in the concepts are universal. From Greece to Modern day Cambridge these exact same things have been just as true of morality conditional upon God(s) existence.

I was not sure exactly what argument you were making but I hope to have clarified my position.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

What statistics do you have that show secularism is related to lower numbers of killings? Find that hard to believe simply because of the enormous numbers killed by the communists particularly. I don't see how these could have been rebalanced.

One major problem I think is the end of the values that remained from codes of chivalry in warfare. The extent that these were based on religious values I don't know, maybe someone else has an opinion on this, but total war was made possible by their decline. The rationalisation of warfare was certainly a nasty phenomenon in the 20th C though.

The numbers killed in the Sovjet Union have been vastly adjusted down after researching the archives.

 

[Augustus]

The numbers killed in the Sovjet Union have been vastly adjusted down after researching the archives.

Can't be bothered to check, but I'm pretty sure Soviet Union + China = over a hundred million deaths if you include avoidable starvation.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

I was not sure exactly what argument you were making but I hope to have clarified my position.

It seems clear enough based on the definitions you use, but I still find it confusing to use those terms, and it should be made more straightforward. It just can't be straightforward understood that somebody who advocates religion, more faith, more subjectivity, which would then lead to objective morality.

 

[1robin]

It seems clear enough based on the definitions you use, but I still find it confusing to use those terms, and it should be made more straightforward. It just can't be straightforward understood that somebody who advocates religion, more faith, more subjectivity, which would then lead to objective morality.

Ok, I will put in 1Robin terms which do to laziness will be as simplistic as possible by necessity.

Objective moral values and duties are:

Those which are true regardless if anyone believes they are.
They transcend our opinion.
Murder would be wrong even if no one on Earth thought it was given God.


I have never known a Muslim to deny this concept. Of course your not really denying but I would have thought Islam had long ago formalized this concept as it is inevitable. God's existence is not a given but what his existence would mean for morality is. Keep in mind moral ontology was my subject here not moral epistemology (though I did use one example just for reference). Moving on to argue for which specific morals are in fact objectively true is more complicated. I was interested in the general nature of morality given God or minus God, not how we go about perceiving it or applying it.

Anyway welcome, nice talking at you.

 

[1robin]

Can't be bothered to check, but I'm pretty sure Soviet Union + China = over a hundred million deaths if you include avoidable starvation.

It's way, way, way too many but I would doubt it was that high. I know Stalin intentionally killed approx. 20 million, but I have no numbers for China.

 

[Mohammad Nur Syamsu]

Ok, I will put in 1Robin terms which do to laziness will be as simplistic as possible by necessity.

Objective moral values and duties are:

Those which are true regardless if anyone believes they are.
They transcend our opinion.
Murder would be wrong even if no one on Earth thought it was given God.


I have never known a Muslim to deny this concept. Of course your not really denying but I would have thought Islam had long ago formalized this concept as it is inevitable. God's existence is not a given but what his existence would mean for morality is. Keep in mind moral ontology was my subject here not moral epistemology (though I did use one example just for reference). Moving on to argue for which specific morals are in fact objectively true is more complicated. I was interested in the general nature of morality given God or minus God, not how we go about perceiving it or applying it.

Anyway welcome, nice talking at you.

Again, my argument holds, advocating subjectivity to get objectivity cannot be straightforwardly understood.

I don't think anybody should talk about objective morals, because it is a known and fundamental sin to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What you are doing is itself intensely sinful. You seek to know as fact what is good and evil, instead of leaving it a matter of opinion for the God the holy spirit to decide.

 

[Midnight Rain]

I liked the other avatar better.

Ok, What is a huge misrepresentation of the facts? What Nietzsche said?

What I said in connection with Nietzsche is a fact. However if you mean that the numbers who have been killed in the 20th century are coincidental to the rise of secularism then I can see why you might think so but it is not so simple. I make this argument and every once in a while I get similar responses saying that we have greater weapons than we used to. True but that would make it all the more horrific to have used them and used them to the extent possible. If you mean there are simple more target alive today then would not make it even more deplorable to have killed such a large number of them. While we in some part can and in some ways cannot chalk up causalities as simply technological advance, we cannot chalk up the willingness to use them at whatever pace we possibly can to technology. We can blame Oppenheim for the atomic bomb but we cannot blame him for our dropping every gram of fissionable material we could possibly produce on two civilian targets (that is not to say it was not forced upon us in a way but it is still morally questionable), Hitler was not killing people by the millions in camps because of technology (he found the cheapest and simplest mean possible. It was also not primarily because there were more people that 50 million were killed. It was because the most educated and advanced nations on earth for the first time systematically target civilian centers. Others did it in isolated instances, only we have done it as a primary tool of total war. It takes an evil person to shoot the one guy who lives next to him. It takes a whole other order of evil magnitude to shoot the thousand people in his entire building. But death tolls in wars is not even the tip of the ice burg. I admit my statistic only came from the US as that is where I live , it is a very multicultural nation, and it has a very clear demarcation between Christian politics and secular politics. Virtually every moral statistic you can find shown a sharp decline beginning in the late 50's or there about. Some of them have increase by several hundred percent's. I have posted hundreds of theses stats and linked to thousands of them. That is an exercise I do care to repeat again. I am too lazy and it is too depressing. I am sure they can easily be searched for if necessary.

Lot of words here. But not a whole lot of meaning. Proportions count. For example if there is a neighborhood where you had a 1 in 10 chance of being assaulted vs a neighborhood that had a 1 in 1,000 chance which one would be "safer"? Which one would be more moral? But what if that dangerous neighborhood that had a 1/10 chance only had 10,000 people. But the city, group, neighborhood ect that had a 1/1,000 chance had 5 million people then they would have more. The first group would have roughly 1,000 people assaulted. The second would also have about 5,000 people assaulted. Total number is 5x higher but it is still a safer group.

War has been made more fair over time. We are very good at killing but now we have rules that govern war. Prior there were no rules. We used to do as we pleased. This has very little to do with religion vs secularism and more to do with media coverage.

And I'm sure you don't want to get into an abortion debate. It can be depressing but I don't see it as a bad thing if is early enough. We will have to agree to disagree beyond that.

Though there are several other ways to measure it. For example racism has gone down tremendously over the last few hundred years. Acceptance of other cultures has gotten more common. Crime has gone down significantly. The chances of you being killed when you leave your house or being raped if you walk down the street is far lower now than it was before. This idea of a golden era of moral upstanding citizenry is a fairy tale.

Maybe the rest of Earth behaves inversely as the US does (in that case the rest of the world would be 15 trillion on the positive side of zero in the debt category) but I doubt it. As far as I know the US is a good approximate for the world in general and I have done enough comparisons to at least satisfy myself and the picture is exactly what I painted above.

Let me add some things you may or may not even be aware of.

1. Despite having the power to annihilate all life as we know it. We have almost done so, TWICE. Once you may be familiar with in the Cuban missile crisis but most non-military folks don't know we came much closer in the 80's. I am not exaggerating when I say the existence of all life depended on one lowly technician who was not even supposed to be at work. He was asked by Gorbechev whether he thought it was a sun spot or a launch he saw in the satellite image. In those days you had to launch the missiles early because it took forever to fuel them. If he said launch we would not exist, he had no idea but gambled on sun flare.
2. If someone asked me 50 years ago what we could do in the future that would have been so terrible that it would unmistakably indicate moral insanity. I would have said to kill our children on an industrial scale. Killing our young in the womb Has killed more people in the 20th century than the wars have in several or more.
3. Another way that secularism is not the cause but only exacerbates the issues is by waging some weird kind of quasi war against truth. Abortion which is death by preference is somehow called sacred women's rights, though it denies those same rights to the unborn, it for some reason can't seem to say the words Islamic Terrorist (kind of hard to defeat an enemy that is not an enemy until you die), and militant secularism has sought to eradicate faith in the worst string of genocides in history per time span.

I could go on and on and on, and while I feel you are sincere I think your emotional commitment here just will not allow any of these facts to go unmolested. I am not sure when it comes to you specifically but to me the most horrific act in human history has been what the left (usually secular) has done to truth. It is a war so effectively waged against truth that it would admirable if not so costly. Again that is not aimed at you but a mind set that is currently destroying a nation others built with blood greater than any other on earth until they took control of politics.

Anyway I understood exactly what you were trying to say but I think the willingness to kill a hundred people more horrific than to kill just one no matter how many exist. Even if you thought you were right would you not be more resistant to pulling a trigger that might kill 100,000 than 10. I would hope so.

1) That has nothing to do with religion. In fact I think that secularism was one of the driving forces that kept us safe in the cold war. If everyone simply believed that they would go to heaven after they died then why not destroy the world? Rapture is comming anyway. There are more than just a few who think this way now that are currently in our government's highest places.

2) I don't think abortion is wrong in the early stages. Many of our problems in society are caused by unwanted children. I would rather a child be aborted at the 6 week period rather than be born into an imoverished family that wouldn't love or care for it. I agree that abortion the best solution in many cases and it is my opinion to keep children if at all possible. But I am not going to judge someone else becaus of it.

3) How is this different than two? I think it is religions that claim truth that often warp it. The earth was created 6k years ago and evolution is a lie...right. Not saying you believe that but between secularism and religion which has a greater history of warping the truth?

 

[Midnight Rain]

What statistics do you have that show secularism is related to lower numbers of killings? Find that hard to believe simply because of the enormous numbers killed by the communists particularly. I don't see how these could have been rebalanced.

One major problem I think is the end of the values that remained from codes of chivalry in warfare. The extent that these were based on religious values I don't know, maybe someone else has an opinion on this, but total war was made possible by their decline. The rationalisation of warfare was certainly a nasty phenomenon in the 20th C though.

No one was killed in the name of secularism. They were killed in a totalitarian government that wished to control its people. It was a state religion not secularism.

But data here ya go. Misinformation and facts about secularism and religion | Psychology Today

 

[Sapiens]

I went back and read the entire post once or twice and I have decided to continue not holding any general discussion with you. There were too many accusations and personal commentaries and too few arguments. Don't think your offending me, I would have to care first. However any dialogue so full of emotion indicates the person has a preference for the position and takes the issue personally. No evidence or reason can have any effect on emotion. I will leave with just one example of how pathetically unjustifiable these accusations are.

Please, lets not pretend that we are writting to change each others mind. We write for the rest of the audience.

You accused me of lying. To know person is lying you MUST know two things. That what they claimed is wrong (I do not think it was wrong and posted two definitions showing it wasn't), and you must know that the person knew what they were saying was wrong. You don't. Even if I was lying you have no way to know it. So the only lie that occurred was your accusation of lying. I know your accusation was wrong, but more importantly I also know you had no way to know what I knew nor my motivation. However I am the greatest expert in human history on why I said what I said and so I know you were wrong.

You said you were leaving, I notice your still here, what is the truth and what is the lie?

I spend a lot of time replying to bad arguments and some to good arguments, but I am not wasting my time with anger and resentment.

Have a good one and let's let this die an ignoble death as is.

Are you gone this time or is this another lie?

I said: "We already established that Nazi Germany, in favoring Social Darwinism was NOT using anything relating to actual Darwinian Evolution, yet you continue to spew that lie." I stand by that statement (and, of course, you prove that you told the other lie, you are still here).

 

[Augustus]

No one was killed in the name of secularism. They were killed in a totalitarian government that wished to control its people. It was a state religion not secularism.

But data here ya go. Misinformation and facts about secularism and religion | Psychology Today

I didn't claim they were killed in the name of secularism, but you can't just pick and choose 'good' or 'bad' secularists, just like religions can't disown the Taliban and ISIS. Historically, I would guess, secular governments have been more violent than religious ones. I'm not claiming a direct causation factor, just that people can't pick and choose whatever statistics best suit their point of view.

Think the key point from that article is 'Secularism also correlates to higher education levels.' Pretty much every positive statistic would correlate with higher education levels I guess.

Anyway, I have no love for religious governments, just a bit sceptical about the statistics.

 

[psychoslice]

Atheist or those who don't believe in a god have their own morals, their not dictated by some old man in the sky, they simply do what is right. I believe that if most Christians found out that there wasn't a god they would do all sorts of horrible things, just because there is no god, how sad that is.

 

[FearGod]

Quick definitions for the unlearned:

Amoral: lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.

Immoral: not conforming to accepted standards of morality.

Moral: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

When someone claims that he/she is irreligious, does it give them justifications to negate teachings of religious communities. For example, thou not steal. Does it give someone who claims to be irreligious the right to steal?

Also, which of the above words excellently describes the life of an Athiest?

I believe it depends on ones soul, some people are religious by act but not by soul.

 

[ArtieE]

Atheist or those who don't believe in a god have their own morals, their not dictated by some old man in the sky, they simply do what is right. I believe that if most Christians found out that there wasn't a god they would do all sorts of horrible things, just because there is no god, how sad that is.

I have a survival instinct so I don't go around hurting people because chances are they, others or the society might hurt me back and that would reduce my well being and survival chances. I have a "help people" instinct because helping people increases my chances of survival because chances are they'll help me back. Christians have a survival instinct and don't go around hurting people because they believe a god says they shouldn't and that they'll survive happily forever if they behave like he says. The reason both me and Christians don't go around hurting people is because we want to survive as long as possible. Giving people the hope that they might survive happily forever gives them added incentive to not hurt others.