The Golden Rule is based on the Ten Commandments? Respectfully, I think it might be the other way around.

Is the Golden Rule right because God commands it? Or does God command it because it's right?

*bows*

Well, we can look at a particular brand of atheism that I somewhat subscribe to, Secular Humanism.

Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of human nature, and that knowledge of right and wrong is based on our best understanding of our individual and joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental or arbitrarily local source, therefore rejecting faith completely as a basis for action. The humanist ethics goal is a search for viable individual, social and political principles of conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility, ultimately eliminating human suffering.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the world-wide umbrella organization for those adhering to the Humanist life stance.

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

I'm an atheist, and my moral compass is grounded in ethical philosophy, the utilitarian principle, mutual respect, non-coercion, freedom of expression, yada yada.

No offense, reenum, especially because it seems like you just want to talk about this stuff, but it's kind of a settled question.

I think that that whether or not the golden rule was first thought of in a religious context has no bearing on who adopts it later and that the assumption that there has to be a neutral source for moral atheism is flawed. If religion had invented the wheel, atheists would probably still drive cars.
To reduce atheism to being a mere reaction against religion seems to paint it in a juvenile light, like a child reacting to a parent. I think that's a bit false, atheism is not a coherent philosophy, it's merely a statement of disbelief, so it really only exists in relation to the argument that god exists. I think for a lot of theists, the idea of not believing in god requires that atheists have some alternate belief, this isn't necessarily true. In it's most reduced form, atheism is a simple non-belief on a par with any other simple choice (do you believe in Santa Claus? Bigfoot? etc). So to assume that the atheist lack of belief represents anything more than a simple decision based on direct experience is also flawed.

This may be more information than you want, but this fellow has written a short e-book (that's available for free) about this very subject.

I found that link via this article (written by the same author).

box pretty well sums it up, though.

Though trollish in nature, I think it's a legit question because I'd always wondered about it and was pretty thoroughly corrected on this stance by my atheist friends.

A commenter on BP's second link makes the point that her moral compass stems from empathy - basically the rule of reciprocity. I thought that was an interesting point given how much bad press "empathy" has gotten from a certain US political party recently.

Personally, much of my moral compass was developed by reading Kurt Vonnegut.

All I can equate internally with the phrase "moral compass" is self-interest. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with atheism or not.

Let's leave the "a"-word out of this. It's not particularly useful.

For at least three generations back, hardly anyone in my family has been religious. In most of the places I've lived, that hasn't been remarkable.

I've never doubted that behaving like a big jerk is counterproductive. For the most part, behaving decently tends to encourage the kind of setting and environment you'd want to live in.

Sometimes if you're sick, or tired, or in a really bad mood, you behave in ways you wish you hadn't. That generally produces bad results. It's just crappiness piling up on crappiness, and it pisses people off and leaves them feeling crappy too.

Occasionally you hear of some fiend getting away with something evil. That doesn't disprove anything. Even if the fiend benefitted personally, the behavior's net effect is still bad, adding to the crap pile.

The specific details of what constitutes good versus crappy behavior can be fuzzy and subject to hashing out, but the general idea works fine without reference to supernatural promises or threats.

Not sure if that answers your question.

Keep in mind that each and every religious codification of behavior was an outgrowth and refinement of a pre-existing moral sensibility in human beings - much of it based on attachment, desire for peace and more abundant resources, and an understanding of cause and effect.

The question is really whether it makes any sense for religions to assert that they are providing some necessary element without which there can be no moral philosophy. There's no reason to think they do, since individuals and societies wholly without religions can and do lead lives according to what most of us would generally see as moral and ethical behavior.

What box said.

Yeah, I was going to say empathy as well. I tend to feel that the majority of people are pretty much wired to feel empathy towards others. We may need to be taught, as little ones, the ins and outs of how to act towards others, but I think for the most part, humans take to that pretty easily.

this is just a feeling of mine, however. Oh, and I'm an atheist, but I was brought up in Catholic tradition, so I can't really speak to my own moral development because it's necessarily affected by Christianity.

is atheism always going to arise out of a conscious rejection of religion

Not everyone has even heard about religion. You can't consciously reject what you know nothing of.

Anthropology seems to indicate that human beings tend to be animistic and anthropomorphic, perhaps because evolution favored those who imputed sentience or spiritual value to objects and plants around them thus causing them to care better for the people, objects, and environments around them - but the diversity of religious development, and the frequency with which nonreligious cultures and societies and people exist, points to the idea that humans don't start with one central idea of 'religion' and then vary from that as a conscious choice. They may instead start with a tendency to believe all sorts of things, a storytelling habit if you will, and from there interweave their attempts to project meaning onto the world with values and morals that are obviously adaptive. But the values and morals and stories follow the adaptiveness, not the other way around.

To me (hard agnostic, formerly Catholic), atheism/agnosticism was not so much a rejection of religion as it was an embrace of a rational, material worldview. I didn't have any big traumatic break with the church; no big crisis of faith. I just realized, gradually but ever more clearly, that a rational view of the world -- materially, morally, socially, and politically -- simply made more sense.

Being an Atheist allows me to utilize SCIENCE! to its fullest, and therefore I need not your old moral compass folderal. I have a moral GPS. I always know where I'm going.

to Hell in a handcart

I'm an atheist, and my moral compass is grounded in ethical philosophy, the utilitarian principle, mutual respect, non-coercion, freedom of expression, yada yada.

Change atheist to agnostic that's where I am. And I came to agnosticism similarly to scody; as she said - agnosticism makes sense to me.

My parents raised me right.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes examines this quite a bit.

From Murray v. Curlett, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L.Ed.2d (MD, 1963)

"An Atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An Atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy.

An Atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction, and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it and enjoy it.

An Atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment.

He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man.

He wants an ethical way of life. He believes that we cannot rely on a god or channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter.

He believes that we are our brother's keepers; and are keepers of our own lives; that we are responsible persons and the job is here and the time is now."

I tend to substitute "humanist" for "atheist".

Also, the Golden Rule

Mostly from my parents, who raised me to consider the effect of my actions on the people around me, which is a fairly generalizable concept.

Folks, trust me, I'm not trying to troll.

This a question I have been thinking about for a few weeks. I believe in a God, and that is where my morality is based.

I've been steadily getting less and less religious as I've gotten older. I'm wondering where I would look to for moral guidance if not God (not that I've been looking to God for a while now).

Still, it seems comforting to have that security blanket in the sky. I was just wondering if non-religious folks and atheists had a similar security blanket.

I believe in a God, and that is where my morality is based.

Do you really think you would become a heartless, inconsiderate licentious criminal if you didn't have the religion?

If not, then is your morality really based on religion?

If it isn't, what is it based on?

You probably already possess your 'security blanket.'

There are various different ways to derive systems of ethics and morals.

Utilitarianism aims to maximize happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Kantian ethics comes from the categorical imperative: "always act as if the maxim underlying your actions was to become a universal rule".

Social contract theory says that we must act ethically to form part of a functioning society.

Biological determinism says that ethical behaviour is to some extent programmed into us by evolution, so that we can work as a group.

Natural law ethics says that we can derive rules of ethics from the principles of nature.

However, these are not always Christian-only or atheist-only. Kantian ethics in particular works for both.

If you try to answer the question "what is good" by "what God says", it's a circular argument that doesn't really answer the question. What makes God good? So many Christian theologians and philosophers use natural law ethics or other options to answer the question instead.

Human reason is one source - for example, Kant's idea of the categorical imperative does not require the existence of a God.

Another angle - humans developed compassion and altruism over the course of their evolution, so behaving altruistically is in accordance with human nature. Peter Singer, for example, has written about this.

So altruism is in accordance with both human reason and human compassion, without requiring God.

If a God were to commit (what would be considered if committed by humans) terrible crimes such as genocide (for example by drowing the population of the Earth in a flood), would such actions still be right just because they are committed by God? Or would they be wrong because they break both Kantian and utilitarian ideas of morality?

(I like It's Raining Florence Henderson's comment also!)

I believe in a God, and that is where my morality is based.

I've been steadily getting less and less religious as I've gotten older. I'm wondering where I would look to for moral guidance if not God (not that I've been looking to God for a while now).

Since you are already questioning, why not also question the foundation of your statements here: You say that your morality is based on God, but if, in fact, there either is no God, or God is not as advertised, then, in fact, your morality was never based on God, it was based on a specific idea of Godliness. In other words, the morality was a human idea of morality imposed on the ideal of a God. If this is the case, and your questioning and drifting from your old God is not based on a fundamental break with the central moral ideals of your old religion, then you are free to continue to follow the moral examples that always made sense to you even without requiring that these ideals sprang from a divine source.

Or to put it simpler: If there is no God or God is not as advertised, then your sense of morality was always of human origin. If so, then removing God from the equation need not impact your sense of morality at all, only your understanding that morality is a philosophy, not an imperative.

As for security blankets, I find them highly overrated.

That's a good point, TheophileEscargot.

I think about it another way sometimes - I know that we invented God, just like we invented Santa Claus. Taking God out of the equation doesn't necessarily invalidate the moral guidelines given in the Bible or other religious texts - it just gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate them, now that we know they came from a person and not an untouchable consciousness.

On preview: what IRFH said.

That was beautifully put, IRFH.

Also, it's important to point out that you stop believing that a God is the source of your moral choices while still finding value and meaning in stories, hymns and prayers, traditions, rituals, and other aspects of religion that you appreciate.

My silly thing I said above is actually the quip my favorite professor* used when we discussed this issue.

He was a Kant scholar, so I think the "God demands it because it's right" was something of a reference to Kant's categorical imperative.

*He was a philosophy prof, but I wasn't a philosophy student. Uh, except when I was, but I wasn't a major/minor in the subject.

It may seem comforting, but it's really constricting. I have a dear friend who really does need to have that security blanket in the sky, because it's the *one* thing in his life that he doesn't have to control. He's got multiple issues that require him to be constantly vigilant of his environment - allergens could literally kill him in minutes.

So what happens in the afterlife, if he keeps that belief system up, is something completely out of control, and he's okay with that.

The *problem* is the mental machinations he has to go through to maintain that. He's alienated friends and family because of it, and somehow he comforts himself with the security blanket in the sky. It's well for him that he enjoys a high standard of living. It would be much harder for him to pull this off living in poverty. It can be done, but for him it would have been more difficult.

3rd gen atheist. My morality has the same source as anybody else's: empathy. Anything else is rationalization.

Still, it seems comforting to have that security blanket in the sky. I was just wondering if non-religious folks and atheists had a similar security blanket.

There's a big difference, though, between "morality" and "being comfortable knowing that when things go pear-shaped, my god is going to make it okay."

There is, however, an intersect between those two things when the person who believes their 'morality' has been prescribed by their god does something bad/wrong/evil/hurtful/immoral, and then does not work to correct it, because all you have to do is ask forgiveness and god will do the cleaning up. And a lot of the christians I grew up with approached life that way.)

But that's not morality in play. It's a shirking of responsibility to the world around you.

I'm not sure how the comfort of a security blanket in the sky provides -- to mix the metaphor -- a moral compass.

To me, the security blanket was about the fuzzy idea that I and my loved ones would somehow be fine (due to divine intention) during various trials and tribulations, and that I'd get to be reconnected with my loved ones after death. But it had literally nothing to do with the idea of not hurting someone intentionally (for example), which -- as many others have said -- derives from a basic sense of empathy, which was most certainly instilled in me at an early age well before I ever went to catechism. (My dad was a cafeteria Catholic and my mom was hostile to religion, so it's not like I was getting any faith-based morality training as a kid.)

It's also why I think I took a pretty dubious view of official church-imposed morality. Even as a practicing Catholic, I knew in my bones that the church's prohibition against birth control, abortion, and homosexuality was bullshit. My having sex with my boyfriend and using condoms whilst doing so didn't in fact hurt anyone (despite the church's claims) the way stealing from a friend would.

The golden rule is, I think, pretty instictive to human beings who have been raised to be conscious of other human beings as human beings. It doesn't require a supernatural force that will punish you if you don't comply.

You don't need religion for morals/ethics (check every classic greek philosopher, I don't think they based their ethics on rapist gods and whatnot). In the end you hit the Humean barrier (is/ought), and then it's left as an exercise for the reader. Most systems will start with the "obvious" don't fuck up with other people (again, there's no way to move that past the is/ought barrier, but it's just too easy to get non-sociopaths to agree to this one). Depending on where the particular philosopher fits on the introvert-thinker/extrovert feeler plane, you build up over that, from the over-the-top "do to others what you wish others would do to you" (meh, don't go projecting yourself on me), through the standard "be nice to other people, help them when seeked, but don't bother them otherwise", to an extreme individualist "just don't rape or steal or kill, dude". You'll get a lot of quacks claiming that their system is "objectively" right (looking at you, Rand!), but the rest always starts by weaseling out of the is/ought question somehow (and god is an easy way to do that), or build their entire philosophy exactly over that hole (Kant, Hume), or going utilitarian (type 1: good and evil are above my paygrade, but here's what *works*, and here's proof that it works, so I propose in the absence of evidence otherwise we go this way, type 2: define "good" as "what works").

By the way, you also don't need a God for Karma either. Buddhism puts Karma as a natural law (more evident in western Zen readings which also shed the Hindu mythology). The idea is that you don't need a god to pay people back what they do, just as you don't need little invisible gnomes to exert a force equal in intensity and in the opposite direction when you push something. That also shows you can have faith without a god. But as mudpuppie said, once you start putting external "balancing forces", you open the possibility of being lax yourself, as in "yeah, I'm just gonna steal that anyway, Karma will balance it out, I'll deal with the consequences later".

Get some introductory philosophy text like Sophia's world (disclaimer: tl;dr), then some philosophical texts. People here mentioned Kant and Hume (standard for that kind of discussion), but Hume is kind of built upon Kant, and Kant is a fucking hard read. I have a friend who jokes that if he were to be stranded in a desert island with only one book he'd bring Kant, because then he'd have a book to *try* to read for the rest of his life.

I just don't like the sight of blood.

Sea anemones. Seriously. They're the earliest creatures, and our earliest genetic ancestors, with a nervous system, and they seem as a species to follow one of two basic instincts: they either sting fellow anemones repeatedly until one gets off the other's rock, or, they work together and build the great coral reef. Our own basic moral choices (religious or otherwise) hard-wired into our very nervous system.

Now, get off my rock.

Qvantamon beat me to it: Buddhism is agnostic. It does not make any claim about how being came about. The (first) Buddha is not a deity nor are any other buddhas. Insofar as I was raised Buddhist- it wasn't comparable to being raised Christian since Chinese religiousness is very different from Western religiousness- I was raised agnostic. My moral compass came from Buddhist teachings, and those teachings do not reference any deities.

I think IRFH got to the heart of the matter.

I couldn't think of his name earlier: G E Moore is as good a place to begin investigating the academic side of this question as any. I don't completely endorse his opinions, but he expresses the basic premises in terms laymen can comprehend.

Where do religious people get their morality? I've always wondered this. Atheists sit down with the hard questions and work them out. Do religious people just take things on faith? "I heard that God wants me to hate gays! Even though he said to love everyone. So I'm going to hate gays." I have to believe that the majority of religious people think about the ethics of their actions. There's a difference between morality and dogma, and I think most folks come to their own conclusions about morality whether or not they choose to couch it in religious terms.

I always figured religion was created so society could get people who didn't have a built-in moral compass to act more appropriately. Most people will do the right thing and be kind because it's the right thing, and for no other reason. But there's always a few who need that threat of eternal damnation to keep them from robbing the local market, getting grabby with their neighbor's daughter, and otherwise acting as an antisocial ass.

Interesting points in those last two posts.

there's always a few who need that threat of eternal damnation to keep them from robbing the local market, getting grabby with their neighbor's daughter, and otherwise acting as an antisocial ass

And it a lot of cases, the threat of dogma doesn't even work. Then, you get hypocritical behavior 'excused' by words and efforts meant to bring salvation, as mudpuppie described above. At best, in those cases, religion is providing the mask for a bad actor to hide behind.

I believe in a God, and that is where my morality is based.

This is probably your stumbling block. Your morality cannot be based on God unless you have an accurate model of God. At best, it can be based on your idea of who or what God is, but that's an incredibly shaky foundation. In fact, swap the word "God" out with pretty much any other noun, proper or not-- "Jesus", "Gaia", your parents, society-- and it's readily apparent that all morality is based on personal observations about something external and thus subject to interpretation.

For the record, I believe in God-- and in Jesus as the son of God-- but I also recognize that my day-to-day decision-making process comes not directly from them but from my interpretation of who they are: an interpretation based on literally thousands of other interpretations going back thousands of years. Broken Telephone, indeed. Atheists probably have it easier, frankly.

If there is no God or God is not as advertised, then your sense of morality was always of human origin. If so, then removing God from the equation need not impact your sense of morality at all, only your understanding that morality is a philosophy, not an imperative.

IRFH FTW!

Empathy, plain and simple. You either have it or you don't, regardless of whatever religious stance you choose to take. If you think in these terms, and as you get a little more age under your skin, you'll be able to recognize those who have it and those who don't. Any talk of religion will necessarily take a back seat to that basic reality.

That has been my experience, so far.

Philosophy and religion are fine things to study, but empathy (as carelessly as the word may sometimes be used) is the core of morality as far as I'm concerned.