Question to Atheists: How do you account for morality?

[Mark L Holland]

Morality is nothing more then asking oneself if someone was to do this to me would I appreciate it or despise it.  That is what morality is.  Morality exists outside of religious precepts.  Morality exists simply as a thought, is what I am doing right or wrong.  And to answer this all one has to ask is would I like having this done to me or would I prefer it not being done to me.  This is morality.

[leonswan2000]

I find the worldview of Atheism to be intellectually bankrupt due to your inability to offer objective morality.  

Maybe SOME Atheists can be morally good. But having good morals (based on the Bible) doesn’t mean you have objective morals. One atheist’s good morals might only be coincidentally consistent with true objective morality where another atheist’s isn’t (examples: Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).

True morals are those that are based outside of yourself, it is not merely a collection of concepts agreed upon because it helps stop the guy with the gun from taking your food and your life. There is something more and the Holy Bible offers us just that. It offers us an objective set of morals: do not lie, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not bear false witness, etc. These morals don’t change depending on your opinion, your situation, or your personal preferences. They are based on God’s character and since God doesn’t change, these morals don’t either. Therefore, it is always wrong to lie, to steal, to commit adultery, and to bear false witness, but not so in atheism’s empty moral vacuum because morality is formed in a godless subjective manner.

Some of you may say that the best moral system is that which brings the greatest happiness to the largest amount of people and the least amount of suffering as possible. That is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t work. Take a look at gang rape, for example. The suffering of one person brings joy and sexual relief to more than one person. In a godless worldview why is it wrong? Because you think so? If you say it’s wrong because the minority is suffering, so what? Why is suffering wrong? It may be unpleasant. It may not be nice. But, from an atheistic worldview, why is it morally wrong to oppress a minority to benefit the majority? Atheism can’t help us here. It just isn’t up to the task of proving solid answers.

So, if you are an attractive young woman walking down a dark road and you see a stranger approaching you, who would you rather the stranger be? A Christian who believes rape is wrong and that God is watching or an atheist who feels the need to 'past on his genes' and grabs you as he adapt his ethics to suit the moment?

Atheists, please answer my question and try to explain to me what morals do you have to offer.

If we got rid of religeon there would be no crime so morality wouldnt be an issue. The bible advocates rape murder incest and so on and so on

[Squid]

I find the worldview of Atheism to be intellectually bankrupt due to your inability to offer objective morality.

1. The Divine Command Theory of morality is logically fallacious.
2. The closest thing to objective morals are those predispositions as the result of us evolving as social primates.
3. Morality is independent of religion or the need for a deity.

[Kylyssa]

If religious morality were objective, Christians would agree on what is moral and what is not.

To me, morality by divine decree is kind of like a dollar store box mix cake.  It is OK but it only comes in certain flavors and falls short of ideal in many cases.  But then there's homemade cake.  As long as you use your brain, proper logic and high quality materials homemade cake is much more versatile and tasty.  Box cakes don't take into account new situations or unusual ones like that guy that developed a gluten allergy and needs a cake make with spelt flour.  OK, so the analogy is falling apart but morality is simple enough to come by if we use our own empathy, our reasoning ability and the reasoning abilities of those who came before us.

If I recall correctly the Biblical rules came from the code of Hammurabi which was created by a government to have uniform laws in that region.  A bunch of lawmakers came up with your Biblical rules.  They didn't do too bad for their times but society has evolved a great deal since.

[The Boatman]

I find the worldview of Atheism to be intellectually bankrupt due to your inability to offer objective morality.

Maybe SOME Atheists can be morally good. But having good morals (based on the Bible) doesn’t mean you have objective morals. One atheist’s good morals might only be coincidentally consistent with true objective morality where another atheist’s isn’t (examples: Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).

True morals are those that are based outside of yourself, it is not merely a collection of concepts agreed upon because it helps stop the guy with the gun from taking your food and your life. There is something more and the Holy Bible offers us just that. It offers us an objective set of morals: do not lie, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not bear false witness, etc. These morals don’t change depending on your opinion, your situation, or your personal preferences. They are based on God’s character and since God doesn’t change, these morals don’t either. Therefore, it is always wrong to lie, to steal, to commit adultery, and to bear false witness, but not so in atheism’s empty moral vacuum because morality is formed in a godless subjective manner.

Some of you may say that the best moral system is that which brings the greatest happiness to the largest amount of people and the least amount of suffering as possible. That is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t work. Take a look at gang rape, for example. The suffering of one person brings joy and sexual relief to more than one person. In a godless worldview why is it wrong? Because you think so? If you say it’s wrong because the minority is suffering, so what? Why is suffering wrong? It may be unpleasant. It may not be nice. But, from an atheistic worldview, why is it morally wrong to oppress a minority to benefit the majority? Atheism can’t help us here. It just isn’t up to the task of proving solid answers.

So, if you are an attractive young woman walking down a dark road and you see a stranger approaching you, who would you rather the stranger be? A Christian who believes rape is wrong and that God is watching or an atheist who feels the need to 'past on his genes' and grabs you as he adapt his ethics to suit the moment?

Atheists, please answer my question and try to explain to me what morals do you have to offer.

First of all, I find your post to be insulting in nature, not because you question the source of our morality, but because you question whether or not we even have it. And so I am linking an article for you to read that cites statistics on the religious affiliations of convicted criminals in our prison system. If you're too lazy to read, I'll sum it up for you: the percentage of prison inmates who are Christian is around 83%, higher than the percentage of Christians in the regular population, whereas the percentage of prison inmates who are atheist is around 0.2%, a much lower proportion than that of atheists in the regular population (8% to 16%).

http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm

Now, getting on to the reasoning. I think you've misunderstood the reasoning that most atheists use - or possibly they didn't word it well. Certainly it is often good enough to judge a situation based solely on which option does the most good... but often there are more complicated factors. For example, in the situation you proposed, if such instances of rape were to occur in great number, it would have negative effects for all of society. Since no one person is more important than any other, nobody should commit rape for fear of those negative effects. Besides which, there is most definitely a genetically guided sense of empathy. Even piranha have evolved to understand that attacking each other is bad for the group as a whole.

We don't need god for morality. It's easy enough to judge what things are bad for society.

[Albino_Raptor]

Chrsitians don't have morality, they have a bank account. The "good deeds" you do, you do in hopes of earning enough plus points with your great IRS up on the cloud. After all, when the day comes and Caskets 'R Us draws the bottom line under your life, you need to have a nice fat heavonly black number written down there, instead of a hellishly red one, right?

That is not morality. True morality only exists in a field where it is neither rewarded nor punished by an outside source, but only applied out of your own inner desire. Morality is nothing but a conditioning acquired by, and for, the social infrastructure you are living in. That is why what is considered moral in Saudi Arabia is different from what is considered moral in Sweden. Humanity packed together in a close environment from a nomad tribe all the way to a megametropolis can only function in a social relationship founded on tolerating, accepting, or - in the best case - cooperating with one another. To make our mutual life greater than the sum of each single person. That is why ever since the stone age, our surroundings have conditioned us to be able to live with our tribemates instead of slitting each other's throats. Just like an ant hive cooperating for the benefit of their swarm instead of devouring each other. An unconcious process that 99.9% of people acquire automatically, just like the ability to talk, walk, think.

In no holy book on this planet is it written down that "You shall not skip the line in a post office." And still, if someone would attempt it anyway and later announce that the bible does not forbid it, he would probably and rightfully have a pissed off crowd in his neck first and then a chat with a few guys in white, carrying both a soothing smile and a tranquilizer shot in the back of their hand. Curious, ain't it? Not to mention that it is quite dangerous to make your morality dependant on a belief system. Because if you do, I would have to ask you: If god, in whatever representation of your religion of choice, tells you tomorrow that from this day on, murder not only ceases to be forbidden, but is actually demanded - would you start going on a killing spree?

[elliebean]

^ FTW

[Heathen's Guide]

The thing I find most annoying in religions is their aptitude for taking every good and decent concept, calling it their own, then accusing everyone else of not following their "goodness".

Christians say that we should not steal, cheat, rape, kill, or torture puppies.  Fine.  People were saying this long before the Christian era in every country.  THESE ARE NOT CHRISTIAN IDEAS!!!  Because Christians have included some of these ideas into the Bible, they run around telling the rest of us that they have a monopoly of "good" behavior.

Decent behavior (which you would call 'moral' behavior) is simply that which allows society to work.  You don't kill so that you don't get killed.  You don't rape or steal because these things harm others and upset the very delicate balance our society has between self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice.

In every society people have learned that unchecked selfish behavior is destructive and harmful.  This does not take a god or a messiah to figure out.  It's the simple mechanics involved when trying to get a whole bunch of people to live together in relative peace. Just because the Christians enshrined these popular notions in the Bible does not make them Christian any more than saying the Earth is round makes the planet yours.  (Of course, the Bible does maintain that the Earth is square, which kind of makes my point for me here.)

[happynewyear]

There is no getting away from the fact that morality in society today ( Atheists being fully paid up members) has been very strongly sculpted directly and indirectly by the Bible. Especially, in the American continents and Europe but also in Africa and the middle east where the bible originated. In general, the far east has been influenced less directly.
Clearly the origins of morality do not begin and end with the bible, as Kylyssa rightly pointed out, the code of Hammurabi predates the bible with it's specific moral code for the people of that time and place.
To find the origins of morality you would have to go back to the first human families and examine the way they lived and interacted together.
It seems obvious to me that morality, like everything else, evolved over time. This of course includes the evolution of the concept of God.
So where does that leave the bible as far as morality is concerned. The bible is one section in a long  line of influences that has "caused" the diverse morality found in the world today.
As far as the bible is concerned, it is clearly amoral as well as being moral in part. I am thinking particularly of the encouragement of ethnic cleansing by Joshua in Canaan and the slaying of three thousand men on the command of Moses after he received the "ten commandments" (Exodus 32:28-29). Ironically, "Thou shall not kill" was one of the commandments given by Jehovah to Moses. The bible also encourages the taking of other peoples land and property, murder, rape, kidnap but the most amoral story for me is the tale of Jeph'thah. In this tale Jeph'thah makes a pact with Jehovah that , if he is successful in battle, he will sacrifice the first person he meets when he gets back home. When, after winning the battle, he returns home his daughter runs out of the house to meet him. His pact with Jehovah is carried out regardless. (Judges 11:20-40)

These are just a few of the moral/amoral aspects contained in the bible. Clearly if this book is the "word of god" then god is moral and amoral. So how can this book be used as a moral guide. Evidently, it cannot because it is the "word of men" who have a personal agenda which was based in the distant past in a completely different culture.
So morality comes from evolution of society with the most beneficial aspects, for individuals and for the society in general, being selected for.

[dogsmycopilot]

I find the worldview of Atheism to be intellectually bankrupt due to your inability to offer objective morality.  

There is no such thing as true morals, all morals are subjective, even the christian ones. So what's your real question?

And I think you misunderstand Bentham.
And that would be 'morally bankrupt" above, intellectually bankrupt doesn't work for the meaning of the sentence.

[leonswan2000]

You only have one outcome. what if like the Christians I don't want to rape you?

[Tanker]

You have revived the dead.

Brains....braaiins .....BRAAAIIIINS!

[Thumpalumpacus]

I offer you Abby.  Abby Normal.