I'm a religious man but I've decided to create a thread to show what atheism can and will be. Since there are so many homosexuals on here and homosexual discussion I decided to use the example of homosexuality.
The idea is that if we alienate morality from religion what would be the result i.e. create an atheist world. My suspicion would be that naturalism would be the result.
I will be intrested to see how this thread develops honestly. Most Atheists are not explicitly naturalists because they view science as a method rather than an ideology. For this reason atheists generally don't apply science to ethics because they continue to believe in free will; it is therefore up to the individual to decide what is right, rather than to be determined according to scientific laws of human behaviour.
The application of science to ethics necessarily implies that science is an ideology and that science can explian everything in nature. man is determined and subject to scientifically verifiable laws. This often- but not always- has close associations with totalitarian conceptions of society such as Nazism and Communism, the latter being far more consistently atheist and naturalistic, as the idea of racial superiority in the former had origins in forms of myticism.
The tenets of naturalism is that man is just another form of animal that is contingent and happiest in a natural condition; any attempt to deviate from the natural only harms the individual and more importantly society.
So, for example, in the case of homosexuality it is in fact natural because it exists and only what is natural exists. However, the function of homosexuality in nature and hence man is for population control. In fact, populations are controlled by war, plague, famine and, and homosexuality. This means that homosexuals should not have children because that contradicts the very function of homosexuality in nature. The homosexual exists solely not to have children and we must respect that.
This naturalism I predict will become the new atheist morality.
The idea that homosexuality is for population control necessarily assumes that sexuality is driven by procreation. I think you will find a variety of responses as there is a conflict over whether sexuality should be understood biologically in terms of procreation or psychologically as a fulfillment of our sexual desires. I favour the later view as it has been probably the most effective remedy for the mental health problems involved in coming out because it represents the hedonist drive towards pleasure as man's natural goal.
The belief that populations are controlled by war, plague, famine etc, is one derived from the Reverend Thomas Malthus. His view was that the poor lacked the ability to control their own sexual desires and that these desires were irrational; therefore population would exceed the food supply leading to a forced contradiction of the population by natural checks. These ideas have become more widespread through the environmental movement, but still implicitly carry the assumption of human irrationality leading to over-population (and through selfishness, over-consumption and therefore the depletion and degradation of natural resources).
I would argue that reducing sexuality purely to biology and therefore to procreation is a form of sexual objectification, in which a persons desires are denied and are therefore rendered as passive object of sexual consumption. The full expression of sexual desire does not lead to promiscuity but to strong emotional bonds, but that these bonds do not automatically fall within the defintion of marriage as life-long or 'till death do us part'. This interpretation of sexuality as biological or driven by procreation has social darwinist implications which are closely associated with conservative ideology. The combination of the two very much leads to 'eugenics' and the belief that as homosexuality is not driven by procreation, it is unnatural.
The emphasis on procreation in sexuality is not infact the result of biology, but of socio-economic instititutions such as marriage and inhereitence as a legally binding contract to distribute property through a society. The free expression of mans natural sexual desires is therefore the abolition of marriage as a legally binding institution so that people are free to act spontaneously on their desires. The belief that sexuality is destructive is not a product of the sinful nature of man, but of the repression of sexual desire into neurotic and perpetually unsatisfying means of gratification (e.g. masturbation and pornography as 'inferior' expression of sexuality as a psychological desire for fulfillment).
As an example of Atheist societies, in the Soviet Union in the 1920's there was a 'sexual revolution' in which homosexuality was legalised because it was felt that it represented a 'psychological' rather than a 'political' problem as it was still considered a perversion, but it was not seen as the responsibility of the state to enforce religious restrictions. The political climate was saturated with an interest in free sexuality. This changed in the 1930's with the re-criminalisation of (male) homosexuality, for reasons which remains unclear, but may has something to do with confusing it with pedophillia, a series of sex scandals, that it wasn't 'proletarian' and constituted a form of bourgeois decadance alienated from procreation and the negative association of homosexuality with fascism (as many members of the SA in Germany were homosexual). The status of homosexuality in the Communist bloc was that it was almost always illegal, as Communists were socially very conservative whilst advancing womens rights. A notable exception is that East Germany legalised homosexuality in the 1960's but it remained taboo.
Homosexuals didn't fare much better in the US in the 1950's as they were persecuted as subservies because they didn't represent 'masculine' and therefore 'patriotic' values. So homosexuality was considered 'un-american'. The Red Scare and the 'Lavender Scare' often overlapped despite the fact those communist parties linked with Moscow shunned homosexuals because they also believed it was taboo as it contradicted the masculine concepts of political militancy to the point where homosexuals were expelled from communist parties.
