Atheist / Agnostics -Where do morals come from?
An extreme example might be rape. Do atheist / agnostics believe that rape is wrong? Would rape ever be right? Why or why not?
Christians believe in morals and therefore believe in a moral creator. How about you?
I think whenever you think "Hmm, maybe I shouldn't do this..?", then that's your morals talking. I don't think they've be fixed into us by a creator, but rather by society and its view on what is allowed or not. Of course, some of us also pick them up other places - in a society where 96% of the people eat meat, I choose not to. Don't know quite where I got that notion from.
they're universal and inherent.
no one ever sat me down and said "look, crystallinectar, it's wrong to kill." nope. i managed to figure that one out all on my own.
i don't need a moral lawgiver to have morals and neither do you.
1) Golden rule - wouldn't want it to happen to me so I wouldn't do it to anyone else. Altruism plays a large part in building our consciences.
Assuming you are unlike most people and you do not care about other people at all:
2) If you were caught in anyway (very likely) then people around you would react and you would be incarcerated at the very least.
3) You would lose whatever social standing you had, probably your job etc
4) There is a chance someone, even your victim, may stop you and you may become injured.
As well as all these reasons, who would WANT to sink so low as to force sex upon someone? You would have to have some sort of mental disorder to commit such an atrocity AND enjoy it still.
I believe that morals are subjective. For instance, I believe that an employer giving her employee/slave to her husband to have sex with so that the husband can have a child is morally repulsive and wrong, but I recognize that although I draw the inspiration for my morality from a number of sources, it is still subjective and possible for someone else to reach a different conclusion. Certainly the Bible didn't condemn it when Abraham's wife did it.
Nor, for that matter, did the Bible ban slavery. I consider slavery to always be wrong. The Bible does not. Christians, therefore, must believe that under certain circumstances slavery is right, otherwise god wouldn't have approved it.
Rape? in any real situation would always be wrong. Could I imagine a situation where it was right? Yes. Let's say that only two humans are left and one of them is not mentally capable of agreeing to sex. The good of humanity would justify having sex without consent in that case. In any realistic scenario then rape is wrong in my moral view. Even of captives in war (again, contrary to Biblical morality.)
A moral has to have a social purpose. When that purpose is no longer valid, the moral is dropped. In Genesis 38, you can read the story of Tamar and Judah. In its time, it illustrated the importance of family obligations, particularly in providing children to a man's widow. We read it and see a crazy story about self-abuse, seduction and prostitution. But that's because our cultural perspective is different. (Where did the "moral" come from? Better to ask where it went!)
For the most part, moral codes are beneficial guides to getting along with fellow humans, but when their purpose is lost and they become ends in themselves, they often become inflexible institutions dedicated to enforcing conformity for conformity's sake. Jesus often took the Jewish authories of his day to task for their scrupulous but meaningless observance of the fine points of the Law. Read Mark 7 and Matthew 23. Jesus' complaint was that the authorities were caught up in a competition to be as moralistically "perfect" as possible, but they had forgotten the underlying purpose of all these little rules. Washing dishes and avoiding work on the Sabbath had trumped showing love to God and neighbor.
I'm quoting Biblical examples for your benefit, to show that "morals" are relative and in many ways arbitrary. We all recognize a general disinterest in killing each other because it diminishes the odds of survival, but some make exceptions for war, violent crime, heresy, etc., including very religious people. Remember Jesus' opinion of Moses allowing divorce? He said it was only allowed because "people are stubborn!" A culture adopts the moral viewpoint that is most convenient to its circumstances and beliefs.
History shows examples of one culture attempting to impose its moral viewpoint on another (Europeans in Central America or in Polynesia). At best it produced amusement and embarassment, at worst, bloodshed. The point is, there is no universal set of specific social rules that applies to every culture. They don't come from "God" but from an underlying human need to improve survival by insuring reliable access to food and procreation, comprehensible human relationships, and tools to resolve conflicts short of extermination.
In the case of rape, rape is an assault, a crime of violence. But Christians muddle its significance with implications of adultery and seduction, using an irrelevant cultural viewpoint that damages the victim as much as the assailant. There are many cultures that don't have such rigid monogamal concepts as ours. They condemn rape but not for the reasons we would.
Yes, atheists and agnostics believe in "morals". But these morals are contingent on deeper human values (e.g. freedom, respect, compassion) and are subject to change depending on how they further or hinder the realization of those values. Humans are the creators and judges of those rules.
Morals come from compassion and empathy. They are very important to survival for our species. All social animals have them in some form or another.
Especially, not from the God who claimed to be Benevolent God and ask his followers to kill whomever not believe to their.
Would it be right moral, if your moral creator said
"Killing is RIGHT"
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