Requiem for a Thought

Atheism's God

I was listening to the radio today, and the host had on two people: a young woman who was 17 and an older man (not related). The reason the host had these people on was that they were affiliated with Camp Quest (www.camp-quest.com), a summer camp "for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural, world view." The young woman has attended the summer camp for the past three summers, and the man is the camp director.

I have to say its always entertaining to listen to religious and non-religious people debate or discuss religion. Usually what happens is a bunch of Christians will call in and say that the bible is the word of God and therefore everyone should read it and live it. As with most people, their skills at debating always seem to me to be pretty lacking. How do you convince someone that they should listen to the word of God (in any form) if they don't believe in God at all? It’s tantamount to circular reasoning.

But what has always fascinated me about atheism is this: Every time I listen to an atheist, he or she says that it is absurd to believe that they are not moral simply because they don’t subscribe to the notion of any higher authority.

We have Christians, Jews, and Muslims who be in a certain God and therefore define their morality based upon principles laid down by that figure. Buddhists subscribe to a morality influenced by the philosophy of a circular nature. Hindus believe in many Gods and define their morality from those supernatural beings. I’m sure that if we studied the religions of small tribes in Africa, South America etc., we’d find a similar pattern: I define my morality this way because a supernatural being says so (in effect).

Ok, so let’s turn now to the atheist. I have no doubt that an atheist can be moral. (Brief side note: I realize that “morality” to many people, especially those in the realm of academia, is fluid and relative, let’s put that notion aside for the moment.) In fact, I would suggest that, as a ratio, there are just as many moral atheists as there are moral Christians (or Buddhists, or Hindus, etc,).

What I want to know, and what I would like you all to comment on (ESPECIALLY if you are or know an atheist), is how do atheists arrive at what is moral and what is immoral? What is the standard?

Murder, Rape, Theft…

Certainly any atheist would agree that those things are wrong. But the question is: why are they wrong. What is it about those acts (and the many others that I could rattle off) that make them wrong. Christianity has a pretty defined reason why murder is wrong. It involves many aspects. Why do atheists believe it is wrong. To me it is not good enough to say, “Well, come on Mike, it’s obvious that murder is wrong.” What makes it so obvious.

So please, let’s discuss this. Give me your thoughts.