Happy Atheist Forum

I'm writing a paper on non-religious communities in the united states as a hybrid or pluralist culture, and I was hoping the community here might like to help me generate some data:

What would you consider to be your top 5 or 10 values (if you had to boil it down to a simple set of concepts such as reason, discourse, tolerance, equality, respect etc.)? What is your rubric for interacting with the rest of humanity?

Hi Six, welcome to the forum.  Would you mind telling us what class this paper is for?  We get quite a few similar inquiries yet  rarely get much background information...we are a very curious group.  Might I suggest also approaching www.meetup.com (http://www.meetup.com) atheist groups in your area so you can sit with a group of atheists to discuss these topics for your paper.  I think meeting face to face would give you a better perception of our values.

Core values? Equality, peace, honesty, humility. freedom, understanding, integrity, curiosity, wisdom, and growth. Yes, I think that covers it. #11, of course, would be the ladies. Will loves the ladies.

to clarify-

i'm an athiest myself, so i have a pretty good idea of these values. the paper is for a pseudo-ethnography class, entitled "Hybrid Cultures- Blended Identity in American Culture". i'm also doing other field research (in person), but for this particular aspect of the paper i really just need a number of people who can give me a brief list clearly stating 5 or 10 concrete principles.

Love, charity, honesty, empathy, peace, justice, freedom, equality, feminism, and happiness.

Without looking at anyone elses responses:

[spoiler:21br3uwf]Fairness, justice, accountability, rationality, empiricism, assertiveness, holisticity[/spoiler:21br3uwf]

Discourse, curiosity, congeniality, altruism (attempted, anyway), and love (in the Freirian sense).

(Don't let Will fool you; he might love the ladies, but you should see the number of restraining orders he has against him.  ;)  )

My rubric for interacting with the rest of humanity... hmm... that one's a bit trickier. In short, golden rule. In practice, I tend to keep people around me from whom I can learn things. Once I feel I've learned all I can from them, I tend to grow distant. People are sources of entertainment and information for me, so that influences my rubric to no small degree.

Honesty. Compassion. Friendliness. Openness. Freedom.

Jim

Truth, equality, justice, honesty, reason, understanding, compassion, cooperation (cooperative ability)

In no particular order:  love, honesty, family, friends, freedom, knowledge

My position is that values do not exist. I (as a self) do not exist. What exists is a human animal in a physical world. Though I accept values and "I" as arbitrary words or concepts. According to my concept of possession, only what exists can be possessed. That said, there are value concepts available to me. I tried for a moment to think which were more important. Off the top of my head, freedom of action and prevention of harm are important to me at the moment.

Hello, and welcome, even if it's just for the purposes of a survey.

Guiding principles or values for me, in no particular order:

Individual Freedom
Equity
Compassion for others (the toughest one for me to live up to)
Peace
Justice
Empathy
Truth
Altruism
Charity
Happiness

I'll quote the Army's 7 core values, which even though I'm no longer in still hold pretty true.

Loyalty
Duty
Respect
Selfless Service
Honor
Integrity
Personal Courage

(Which not so coincidentaly makes the acronym L.D.R.S.H.I.P or leadership)

empathy, freedom, willingness to learn and reason.  I think all the rest of me stems from that, though there's a sizeable component of laziness.  Though that's not a value.  More of a goal.  

QuoteWhat would you consider to be your top 5 or 10 values (if you had to boil it down to a simple set of concepts such as reason, discourse, tolerance, equality, respect etc.)?

1. Personal satisfaction, broadly conceived.  This subsumes all other values.
2. Power, broadly conceived.  This is the means by which I attain personal satisfaction.
3. Logic
4. Autonomy
5. Security

QuoteWhat is your rubric for interacting with the rest of humanity?

How I operate depends on the circumstances.  But my general rules of thumb are conflict avoidance, cooperation or coordination, assertiveness and critical alertness.

I have one:

Think.

Live, laugh, learn and try not to screw too many people over while clawing your way to the top.  (That last one equals empathy right?)

Reason
Equality
Freedom

I can't think of any more, but more specifically:
I am an antitheistic, agnostic, apatheistic, atheistic, skeptical, liberal, feministic, masculinistic, pro-youth rights, anti-abortion, communistic, egalatarian, libertarian, ethically essentialist, ethically cognitivist, deontological, pacifistic, anationalistic, environmentalist, naturistic, resistentialistic, Esperantist dozenalist.

Quote from: "sixfinger88"What is your rubric for interacting with the rest of humanity?

Sharing thoughts and making deep and meaningful relationships with a select few.

I am egalitarian in terms of human rights but I believe humans should absolute have a small group of others (their family, friends, and lovers) that they hold high above the rest of the world.

Hedonsim, sloth, gluttony, physical attractiveness and pies.

Sex, drugs and Rock 'n Roll  

Political:
Humans have rights based in property: Themselves, their lives, their minds, their work, their possessions, etc.
Violation of these rights is evil, and also voids the rights of the aggressor.

If you follow this idea to its ends, that makes me a Libertarian.


Philosophical:

Rationality rules--Logic applied to facts.

This, carried further, and combined with my idea of rights based in property, leads to many of the conclusions of Objectivism( in pragmatism there are no facts )

QuoteObjectivism holds that:

   1. Reality exists as an objective absoluteâ€"facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
   2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
   3. Manâ€"every manâ€"is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
   4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Eating babies -- er -- I mean -- eating puppies.

Quote from: "SSY"Hedonsim, sloth, gluttony, physical attractiveness and pies.

Quote from: "thiolsulfate"Eating babies -- er -- I mean -- eating puppies.

Pies made of babies and puppies! Oh, glorious Heaven!  

My core values include not writing requests for other people to take their time to help me with information for a paper then never returning to tell them the results of that papers.

Fellow HAF members, do you like answering these polls just for the hell of it and the benefit of anyone who is curious?  Or should I make posting this kind of stuff against the rules unless prior permission is granted by an admin?

I've only been here a few days, but I think it's fine.

I never have a problem with polls. People like answering them because people like talking about themselves. Oops, I've revealed the secret of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter!  :D

If they don't come back, I really don't care, either. I answer for my enjoyment, not because I'm really interested in the person's research. Selfish, I know.