Where do you atheists get your morals?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Part of it comes from one's own innate temperament. Part of it comes as our personalities develop being shaped and influenced for good or ill by our families, our schools, our social group, and our culture.
The rest comes in adulthood from personal experience, learning from our mistakes, and growing in character. At that point, we make the choices and allow what systems (philosophical, religious, or psychological) we want to influence our personal ethical system which hopefully will continue to grow and evolve as we age and mature. 
...but it was well worth it. Got "Kindness, forgiveness, empathy, charity and a few others.
Was going to get "Truthfulness" but ran out of money.
I'm an atheist and am routinely baffled by the question as it is presented to me a few times a year. I'm just as weary of answering it as the comic strip character, as the person asking seldom wants an accurate answer. The person usually wants something to confirm the 'badness' of atheists to himself/herself, in order to feel a little more comfortable with the idea that the atheist, as decent, kind, sensible, honest, etc., as he/she seems, is supposedly still going to hell...
May I copy and paste your statement in order to construct a standard response sheet? .
Last edited Tue Jan 29, 2013, 09:28 AM - Edit history (1)
Yes, of course, I don't mind if you copy and paste it.
I grew up in a very liberal mainstream church family. I attended the Anglican church through high school. Ever since I was a boy I questioned and never 'believed', however it wasn't until then that I began to identify myself as an atheist. After decades of study, exploration, psychology training, etc., now, if asked, I am ignostic.
I do not accept the proposition of god/dess or god/desses existence as meaningful or valid. It is "not even wrong" as Pauli would say about certain scientific theories. The theist, polytheist, panentheist, etc. all accept the proposition as meaningful and deem it to be 'true' in some form, shape, or fashion. Atheists also accept the proposition as meaningful and deem it be 'false'. Agnostics also accept the proposition as meaningful and deem it be 'inconclusive' without further proof. There are as many 'god/s' as there are human beings to have individual psychological conceptions. Therefore, I tend to address individuals and not religions. No two Christians are alike as are no two atheists. If science does not have an answer for a question, then I am ok with accepting the mystery of not-knowing at this time.
But my first principles no longer rest on the proposition of 'god/s exist'. I find it allows me to approach living with an even more open mind than I espoused as a younger man. I am free to participate or not in the communal aspects of religion as I accept them for the psychological necessities they often are as opposed to supernatural realities so many wish them to be. Some religions and philosophies are more amenable to such ways of thinking - Taoism, Buddhism, certain schools of Hinduism like Vedanta, Ifa, and Philosophical schools such as Stoicism - and those are the ones that most interest me.
very straightforward and accessible language. My compliments.
As for myself, I grew up in small town North Dakota - Lutheran country (basically, they want their pastors to be more or less moderate regarding everything - not too much hellfire and brimstone and not too much touchy-feely) - and my family really focuses on 'eternal life' and related (selected, of course - the rich having as much chance of entering heaven as a camel getting through the eye of a needle is pretty inconvenient sometimes), but isn't too firm on anything else. I sought a lot of meaning at an early age, and I suppose I still do (although the inevitable outcome of such searching for me is the lowering of expectations...) When I was told 'this is true,' I took it literally - something either is or isn't. So... I became rather tied up in the Bible that was available to me and grew deeply disturbed by the dichotomy between what it seemed to me to be clearly prescribed manners of behavior and what really went on around me.
Eventually, I underwent a painful and necessary shift from blindly accepting King James Bible writings as absolute truth to quite another perspective - that I accept nothing as likely to be true unless I evaluate the subject carefully based on information made available to me through personal experience and, generally, sources I have strong reason to believe are trustworthy on the particular subject.
What probably differs most between us is that I find the psychological 'benefits' to individuals resulting from communal religious activity to be of negative value when aggregated over the range of entire societies. Religions tend toward provincialism and that provincialism is easily manipulated to set groups (or entire societies/nations) against each other. I suspect that many of the religions/philosophies you mention are more universalist in scope, but they still bond people together in us/them mentalities (Buddhism has been used by many societies to promote warfare and Hinduism definitely has been employed in the same capacity over many, many years).
My attitude is that if some psychological benefit is to be derived from communal religious activity, then there must be forms of communal secular activity that should provide the same benefit. Such activities are probably less likely to result in easily manipulated us/them perspectives. Of course, I may be wrong...
Thanks again for sharing such well articulated and thoughtful perspectives
I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state within any country or political system. I accept the necessity of 'congregating' with those of like mind, and you are quite correct that this can and often does lead to provincialism.
I am a pragmatist in many ways and recognize that even if all of humanity were willing to face the fear of the unknowable without resorting to god and even if all of humanity were willing to accept that we as sentient beings have created and continue to create systems of ethical action, i.e., morality, we would still form social groups. It is inevitable, laudable, and quite often terrifying. Religious groupings and secular groupings ultimately tend to look and act the same. They just seem different on the surface. Just look at the provincialism of political parties in America and the us versus them of Democrats and Republicans. How like 'religion' has that become? 
And I agree, even Buddhism has been used by cultures to wage war, though historically, it has been far less often than the revealed religions of Abraham in the West.
Thank you for the compliment. I have many to thank for who I am today and how I communicate. I was fortunate to have college English professors for parents. An undergraduate degree in Philosophy taught me how to reason and argue. My profession is the 'talking cure' so words and how they are spoken are both fascinating and important to me. I suppose I also just enjoy a good conversation and the chance to teach knowing that what I say affects others. I piss off as many as I please these days.
Very nice chatting with you and look forward to more here in the future.
Hope you don't mind if I cat-and-paste this for future reference.
No I do not mind if you 'cat-and-paste'. I like cats.
so I was just having a little fun.
for you both. Dr. Haidt and I have actually had quite a few discussions on the subject. We come from different psychological schools - his is Positive Psychology with a strong grounding in scientific materialism and mine is a Psychodynamic Psychology with a grounding in the phenomenological philosophy of somaticism. We agree on some points and we disagree on others. But we do both agree that human beings have an innate 'ethic'. Now whether it fully develops into a chosen 'morality', a given cultural religious 'morality', or is perverted and damaged to the point of an 'anti-morality', I think he and I disagree on those.
Praise Cheesus!
People here never cease to amaze me. Any topic, no matter what, you can post a pic that is so suitable. Incredible.
They judge their own acts. They judge other people's acts.
They think on how they should make those judgments, and on how those judgments should affect their future behavior.
There is a very real sense in which, as a previous poster wrote, atheists get their morality from the same place as the religious. We invent it, or borrow it from other people who invent it. The difference is we know that, and don't spin tales about some god giving it to us.
Best. Answer. Ever.
Well done! 
You know, like genocide in Deuteronomy 7:2 ands Samuel 15:2-3
Subjection of women - 1 Timothy 2:12, Ephesians 5:32, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
Sending out a woman to be gang raped - Judges 19:24-28
Child sacrifice - Judges 11:30-39
Slavery - 1 Peter 2:11 and Colossians 4:1, Luke 17
Antisemitism - Titus 1:10-11, Acts 3:14-15
Incest - Genesis 19:30-38.
Of course the believer will say that these chapters and verses are taken "out of context" 
That's a scientific fact.
-p
That link gave evidence that morality 1) is old, and 2) spans different religious notions.
But it gave no evidence that religion isn't just as old.
Obviously, current religions aren't that old. By an order of magnitude. But religion might be.
For all we know, religion and morality evolved as we did.
Some aspects no doubt serves practical purpose.
Some aspects no doubt are the detritus of our particular history.
Not every religion has a god. But every religion has a notion of how to view death and provides some ritual around that. Perhaps earliest man invented religion as a response to thoughts about the lost of loved ones and comrades? Or maybe earliest man's predecessor!
Which doesn't make it true or necessary. But perhaps quite old.
"mourning" isn't a spiritual thing, and to me religion, and spirituality are two very distinct things.
One requires a recipe book to follow and whence completed are somehow then allowed to transcend while the latter is a unending self discovery.
-p
It cures even the smellest cheese.
oh, wait--morals! I don't have any of those--I just do what's right..............
Yes, I should be reported 
Morality minus piety does not equal immorality. Religion (which has shown that it can be just as immoral as anything else) does not confer morality -- environment, conscience and maturity do.
rocktivity
spores.
Let us prey.
