The Value Of Atheism

The following tweet was put out by Adam Baldwin the other day (note: he frequently deletes his tweets so the reference is no longer valid):

@adamsbaldwinAdam Baldwin

What have #atheists ever accomplished with their #atheism that would make their#atheist opinions worthy of respect?

http://twitter.com/adamsbaldwin/status/11173114775863296


Adam Baldwin put out the challenge above asking essentially, what did atheism ever do for humanity. Of course, he worded it in a very negative and sophistic way.

My response is as follows:

The value of atheism is that it is a rejection of the FALSE religious claims of just cause for genocide, genital mutilation, stoning to death, torture, and hate (etc). Atheism itself (the rejection of theism) provides ABSOLUTELY NO BASIS for such obviously abhorrent actions.

So, you might ask, how does a secular person justify 'morality'. The answer is: EXACTLY THE SAME WAY EVERY OTHER SINGLE PERSON HAS EVER DONE SO.

You learned your fundamental moral behaviors LONG before you knew anything about the details of the bible (and, in fact, a lucky few among us do not have any poisonous religious claims polluting their mind yet they are moral beings as well). You ALREADY knew it was wrong to hurt others because you FELT it. And the few people who don't feel this way are the psychopaths and sociopaths in the world. It has NEVER been demonstrated that a non-belief in god is correlated with a lack of empathy in any way. On the other hand, religious up-bringings HAVE been shown to have PTSD-like effects on children.

We humans have 'mirror' neurons which enable us to virtually experience what others actually experience. When you see someone else harmed you (tend to) imagine that you feel what they are feeling (unless you are mentally damaged). This is the underlying basis of our empathic drive and forms the fundamental basis for our sense of morality. Neuroscience is making incredible progress in this area of research.

Secondly, humans have the ability to share our ideas as a collective group. Through various agreements (implicit and explicit) we have established rules for social order that result in mutual support and protection of groups that we identify with (and to our great collective misfortune, also leads to conflicts with groups that we do NOT identify with).

Finally, because we are able to observe, reason, and make determinations for our individual and collective well-being (e.g., I'm hungry, I need to eat -- or my family is hungry, I need to hunt) we are also able to make similar determinations about our behaviors and their consequences in other areas of life.

Go back 10,000 years and imagine that you are a stranger entering a village and you start acting erratically (yelling, jumping around, acting unusual, foaming at the mouth, etc). The villagers might well kill you in self-defense.

It's not immoral to act strangely and yet people would have KNOWN not to do it. They don't need a 'god' to tell them how others are going to react to things.

You don't have to actually DO a thing to make a fairly good assessment of this result and adjust your behavior accordingly, if you are familiar with the customs and culture.

The problem you immediately run into when you try to use the Bible to justify some kind of absolute moral foundation is that #1 the 'laws' for people clearly changed over time (don't eat pig, ok to eat pig -- cut off foreskin, don't cut off foreskin -- god commanded slavery in the OT, slavery tolerated in the NT, and now is slavery moral or immoral?) and #2 the rules for 'God' are obviously different than those for men, if moral law was ABSOLUTE it would, by definition, apply equally. Yet, it is said to be immoral to commit murder but it's ok to commit murder if God orders it as he did of Abraham, as he did at Jericho, as he did to the many tribes, as he did of the first born of Egypt, and as he did of nearly the entirety of creation in the Flood.

Some final thoughts...

Do you think it's morally ok to CUT OFF a womans entire clitoris? Some religions^[Islam] claim that you must, how do you propose to prove them wrong? Does the Bible say you can't do that? It ORDERS the followers of Judaism to cut off part of the male penis so obviously god doesn't think too poorly of such practices and he utterly fails to mention any prohibition on doing this to women.

And Slavery existed in Jesus' time but he never spoke out clearly and condemned it. And the Bible was used for thousands of years to Justify slavery and the poor treatment of jewish people. Only very recently (historically speaking) did religious leaders FINALLY grow a fucking conscious and help to speak out against slavery.

These issues just show the complete ridiculousness of religious claims. Unless you can overcome all those objections then you have no basis to claim the superiority of religious claims.

I don't think it's moral/ethical to cut ANYTHING off any infant (unless there is a clear and established medical need). That goes for foreskins, clitorises, extra fingers or toes (unless they present a medical danger), penis on a hermaphrodite, or ANYTHING else [see also Circumcision]

Addendum: I would like to add here, that by rejecting rigidly, closed-minded claims of religion immense progress has been made in the sciences while the Catholic Church was busying burning scientists like Giordano Bruno at the stake and imprisoning Galileo Galilei. The Church had an odd love/hate relationship with scientists, they were sometimes supporters of those who would stay within their strict bounds. But it is that very factor of an a priori boundary of inquiry that is at the heart of the problem and when you compound that with a bloodthirsty penchant for the most extreme forms of torture you can imagine for those who dared think for themselves then yes, I do find fault. How many Popes in a row ordered murder and torture be done in Christ's name? And is even ONE acceptable? Imagine if an atheist organization existed today that had tortured people for 1000 years? Would ANY organization get away with that other than a religious one?

So I say those who have rejected these false religious beliefs have indeed done many wonderful things for mankind as a product of that rejection, or to use Baldwin's phrase "with their atheism". AND they didn't do it out of fear or bribery.

How might we discern Objective Moral facts?

If objective moral facts exist then they would be facts of the matter regarding an action, behavior, or thought (I will just use 'behavior') to being 'right' or 'wrong'. Morality does not apply to all behaviors, this is an important and key observation.

There is no proof that objective moral facts actually exist. It could be that right and wrong is entirely an opinion held by a being capable of holding such thoughts. But I would like to present my viewpoint on why objective moral facts MIGHT exist, and a brief consideration of what they might look like. PLEASE note that this is NOT a proof of objective morals, it's merely an exploration of how they MIGHT exist on the nature of the concept of Morality itself (as being distinct from other concepts).

First, what I do mean by "distinct from other concepts". If I said Morality was the distance between planets you would instantly recognize that I was NOT actually talking about Morality. So this concept of distance between planets is not part of the distinct concept of Morality. So what IS the distinct concept of Morality? This is the real question we're trying to address. And our problem is that even WE don't really know what we MEAN when we talk about Morality. All we know is that it's something our brains DO, but the details are fuzzy. But we can identify at least some things that are not part of the concept, and I'll show that we can identify some that are. The question then becomes, on the properties necessary for Morality to be a distinct concept - can we then deduce any Evaluative moral statements that must apply (if you removed them then Morality would no longer be a distinct concept).

Any human endeavor that proposes to ask a question about something requires an Evaluative statement upon which to base any measurements (formal or informal). We often only have a very fuzzy idea of what we mean when we ask such questions. We do this about thousands of things and don't really think anything about it. Is it an objective fact that pressing the right buttons on a telephone will let you speak to your friend in New York? Of course it is? What is your yardstick for measuring this? Well, you push the buttons and you hear your friends voice and later on your talk to your friend in person and they confirm, yes that was me on the phone. Something physical happened in the universe that we could measure - but the thing we're measuring is completely arbitrarily defined by us posing the question in the first place. So what you observe & measure is determined by the very Yardstick that you define. What is a second? Is there an objective fact of a second? No there isn't! We measure a second against an atomic process, when it happens 9,192,631,770 times we call that a second, that fluctuation is the objective fact of reality, 1 second is a quantity of that measurement. We used to measure seconds against rotations of the Earth but we found that wasn't actually just measuring time, it was measuring all kinds of other things that made it (very slightly) unreliable! We had a poor yardstick, we found a better one.

So whenever we want to actually measure something, we must must have an evaluative statement that provides the CORRECT yardstick by which to measure it. We can make due with poor yardsticks, but they will give fuzzier answers.

Is it 'hot' out today? Is an evaluative statement but there are a lot of hidden assumptions. 'hot' relative to what? Most often the person asking would be asking relative to the temperature range in which humans are comfortable. And it isn't JUST temperature, humidity would play an implicit role as well, wind speed, and many other factors would all come into play.

Now imagine that I ask "is it wrong to initiate force against another human being"? This is a question that demands an evaluative statement about Morality by which to measure it. Let's look more closely at Morality in detail, and see if we can deduce any facts independent of our mere intuitions about it.

Built-into the very concept of Morality is the necessity that the agent either be capable of performing the action (a deontological/duty moral) or of not performing the action (or avoiding it). Morality simply doesn't apply to falling rocks, the rocks are never considered immoral. If we removed culpability from the concept of Morality it would not be meaningful.

So we CAN identify at least some of the necessary concepts that are part of Morality. Two other important concepts are intentionality and awareness of the consequences.

Someone who has suffered major brain damage may no longer be able to control their actions, if they harmed someone in such a state we wouldn't hold them morally culpable. They would lack the necessary properties that are inherent in the notion of Morality. They would be acting irrationally.

Neurological studies comparing parts of the brain believed to be responsible for empathy show marked differences between dysfunctioning psychopathic brains and normal brains. So I think that empathy is very likely a necessary property to possess to be considered Morally culpable. I'll grant this one is on weaker ground than the others but I think it is not difficult to imagine how this plays a critical role.

What about the ability to learn? We do not consider infants to be morally culpable, they do not demonstrate the necessary levels of cognition and understanding. They don't seem to be able to help what they do. As they grow more capable it seems rather self-evident that they must learn. A being that could not learn, I do not believe, could become morally culpable, any more than the brain damaged.

What about a brain that can learn, but cannot apply that learning to future behaviors? They must be able to apply what they learn to future behaviors.

So there are a number of things that seem to be inherent and necessary to the concept of Morality:

(1) culpability
(2) intentionality
(3) aware of consequences
(4) rationality
(5) empathy (and other intact emotions)
(6) ability to learn
(7) ability to apply knowledge to future behaviors

It certainly seems to me that if any of things are missing then the very question of morality would be irrelevant for that object (or being).

So now, let reconsider our question - on these necessary properties of Morality, "is it wrong to initiate force against another human being?"

If we do, a morally sufficient agent would be culpable, they would have intended to cause harm, they would be aware of the consequences (they would know how others are likely to feel and how they themselves would feel if the situation were reversed; as well as what others might do to them if they are caught), they would have had an opportunity to have learned and apply this knowledge to their action. Would a rational being then act in such a harmful way?

The question is, can you remove the Evaluative statement "It IS wrong to initiate force against another human being" from the concept of Morality and leave the concept intact, or is that statement necessary on the facts of Morality itself?

Perhaps you can, perhaps not, but these are the types of statements that would need to necessarily hold given the inherent properties of a distinct concept of Morality.

Now imagine the set of ALL POSSIBLE Evaluative statements that could possibly relate to Morality, if you can remove every single one of them and leave Morality intact then there are no objective morals. If any of them are necessary on the facts of Morality, as a distinct concept, then those would be objective moral facts.

I do NOT think the properties I've listed here are, by themselves, sufficient to sustain any objective moral facts. I've only tried to point how I think that such a thing could exist and what they might look like and how we might eventually discern them. Before we can do any proving, I think that we would need to understand what mechanisms in our brain processes Morality and understand what the necessary properties of those structures are.

I do think that modern neurological studies are showing extremely strongly that there is a (common) neurological basis for human morality, so even if there are no objective moral facts there is almost certainly a phenomenological basis for morality. I'll try to expand on that in the future (or dig up some good resources).

Living Without God

What living without belief in a god means to me...

I didn't stop being generous when I stopped believing in Santa

It means that I value human compassion. There will be no redemption in the distant future. Each and every person needs to be responsible for improving our collective well-being. People are abused and murdered every day and we have to work to improve this situation. Those who survive the abuses heaped on them do not generally end up being better or stronger people for it, far too often they end up continuing the cycle of abuse and they need our help and compassion; first and foremost in prevention.

It means that I cannot rely on the non-existent supernatural to make everything right at some nebulous point in the future. Therefore I must take my share of responsibility for how things are now and how things will be in the future.

Where do morals come from if not from god? They come from human behavior processed by human thought. This answer should be obvious. But without god there can be no absolute right or wrong? Wrong, there is no absolute right or wrong with god. The god of the bible tried to get people to murder their own children. The god of the bible ordered the slaughter of every man, woman, and child at Jericho (Josuha 6). The god of the bible directly Murdered all the first-born of Egypt, including innocent infants. The god of the bible Murdered every man, woman, and innocent child on the planet (except Noah's family) as part of the flood. Doesn't any of that seem wrong to you? If so, why is your innate sense of right & wrong better than gods supposedly is?

There are better ways to deal with our problems.

If the Christian god existed, he has allowed billions of children to be subjected to abusive parents (emotionally and physically) and then proposes to punish those children with eternal torment once they grow up to be less than ideal human beings? Doesn't that just seem wrong to you?

Consider the alternative, that we are animals who are slowly gaining greater cognitive abilities and we're now able to look back at our history and see the evils which we have propagated on our own. We are now capable of doing better but you have to take steps to be responsible for yourself and not scapegoat your own failings onto some mythical Christ.

And we are collectively guilty today for not immediately putting a stop to many of the evils that continue. Some will take longer but there are many things that we could end today if we all say, we're just not going to take it any more (cue rock music).

For example, it is not acceptable to stone people to death. It is not acceptable to put anyone to death, however horrible of a person they have been they are a product of our own collective failure to take action. I do not propose they be allowed to roam around free, but it is just not right to kill another human being unless it is absolutely necessary to prevent them from causing immediate harm.

500 million people live in abject poverty, without access to acceptably clean water, food, and shelter. and some 3 billion people live in unacceptable conditions that no human should have to endure.

15 million children die every year of starvation but for the cost of only ten Stealth bombers, every single child that starved to death over the past 10 years could have been saved. But these children will continue to suffer and die, every year, day in and day out, until we all stand up and say 'no more'.

Another major issue we face today is that the population growth rate is alarming (despite these problems which cause unacceptable levels of suffering and death). As we begin to fix the deplorable conditions our brothers and sisters are forced to live under we must gain control over our own reproduction rates. We have to be responsible and educate people so they can make better choices for themselves and others. And under these circumstances it is morally detestable to continue to preach this nonsense that god gets irate if you use a condom (or other forms of birth control).

I would love to see a world where abortions are not necessary but human-kind has not reached that level. If you are "pro-life" and want to end abortions then you need to go about it the right way.

First and foremost, by ensuring those who are alive and suffering have proper food and health care. If you cannot do that then you are not pro-life, you are just pro-suffering.

Secondly, you need to ensure that every child has a safe and happy home to grow up in with loving parents. And you need to accomplish this with compassion, not by forcibly removing children from their parents and shoving them into foster homes where they are abused further. If you want to "fix" a broken family move in with them and show them a better way. If that is too much of your time to bother with then you are part of the problem. Our current system of child protective services in the US is utterly broken and it wreaks havoc on everyone it touches. It is not based on compassion for the child although it pretends to be so. And through the rest of the world... well, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

It is irresponsible to assume there is supernatural safety net that awaits us. This is nothing more than a boorish excuse for inaction. So please, wake up and take some action to make the world a better place.

Is-Ought dilemma & morality

The Is-Ought problem is a fairly famous philosophical dilemma explored famously by Hume, Searle, Huxley, and many others. It is also sometimes used as an argument against atheism with the excuse that you can't get an "ought" from an "is" and therefore atheism is without any foundational moral basis (a Non Sequitur). Nevermind that the dilemma is NOT resolved, it is a still an open question as to exactly how Humans form Oughts - but theists are nothing if not famous for declaring victory at any gap in the scientific knowledge base.

Recently, Sam Harris has argued that a good foundational basis for secular morality is well-being, with the axiomatic presumption that the world with maximal suffering for all conscious beings is NOT the most desirable state to all of said conscious beings. In what amounts to the social sciences, this is about as self-evident a statement as you can get. I can tell you, with some confidence, that *I* do not wish for maximal suffering for all conscious beings, Q.E.D.

But, in the recent Sam Harris-William Craig debate (Does Good Come From God?), Craig asserted that axioms are equal to taking something on faith, this seems a rather desperate statement for him to have made but he did. Axioms are NOT taken on faith - they are TESTED and proposed, axioms can and have been rejected. This is true in logic, it is true in mathematics, and it is true in every field of science. The primary axioms in those fields are universally accepted (and where they are not, additional axioms/presumptions would be stated up front) AND they have been extensively tested for contradictions. They are not, in any way, shape, or form, equivalent to accepting that a god exists, merely on faith.

Take a simple example from mathematics, the identity axiom states that "a = a" - you can try other axioms but they immediately run into absurd and contradictory conclusions that clearly conflict with reality. The only accepted axioms are those which are either accepted as self-evident (some are tautological or true by definition), demonstrated to be absolutely necessary, or are only conditionally accepted (if this, then that).

In the case of the physical sciences (including logic and mathematics to the extent they are used to draw conclusions about reality) we also test the axioms against reality. If an axiom can be shown to yield conclusions that conflict with reality then it MUST be rejected (in that context). This is another vital step that is utterly missing from the god-proposition.

Let's apply this same standard in the context of the bible. If one takes the bible literally it asserts that the prayers of the faithful would be answered, that they could literally move a mountain with only the tiniest grain of faith. And yet, even the most faithful are unable to effect change in our world by prayer. It has been tested and demonstrated that prayer is not effective. Therefore, the god proposed by the bible has therefore, by any scientific measure, been demonstrated to be a false proposition. But Christian's refuse to reject their hypothesis based on this evidence - it is this presuppositional bias that is the difference between religion and science. Science is prepared to reject ANY conclusion, ANY hypothesis, ANY axiom, ANYTHING that can be shown to be unreasonable based on the evidence alone (even if, in reality, biases and human nature creep into the process in individual cases - on the balance, science has been the most objective route to truth ever known to have been devised - and as we find problems with the system they are corrected, which is to say, the sciences have improved over the ages).

In fact, Christopher Hitchens has argued that religion is our first attempt at philosophy and science. It is just unfortunate that so many have clung to the extremely flawed version for so long, but apparently, such is human nature.

And finally, presuming the existence of a god does absolutely nothing towards establishing the objective existence of some moral foundation. God could simply not care what humans do, in such a world humans would be left to make their own choices, evil deeds would be allowed to continue, and I cannot imagine a SINGLE thing in our world that would argue against such a god.

Craig makes two assertions to support his claim, let's see if they are worthy of axiomatic status.

1) that the crucified and risen Christ is evidence - and he asserts that the fact of the crucifixion is (all but) beyond reproach by the mass of scholarly support - but SURELY Craig is familiar with Schweitzer and MANY others who reject this claim?

"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed."

Albert Schweitzer(1875-1965, Nobel Prize 1952), Ph.D, Christian theologian and Dean of Theological College of Saint Thomas at the University of Strasburg
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: First Complete Edition, trans. W. Montgomery, et al., ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), page 478
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/
http://books.google.com/books?id=7UPLuZZ8NHIC&dq=Quest%20of%20the%20Historical%20Jesus&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q&f=false

For Craig, educated as he is in biblical studies, to make such an outrageous claim demonstrates the danger of this type of cognitive bias. Hiding contradictory or conflicting data is not tolerated in science.

Just a quick review of the issues with accepting this assertion: There are no contemporaneous accounts by independent scholars of the crucification or the redirections (or the saints rising from the dead). The gospels are written 30-60 years after the supposed events took place. We have not a single autograph. There is evidence of tampering & redaction (to the point of destruction of documents and murder) and NO amount of textual criticism can PROVE that the copies we have are even close to the ORIGINALS - only that the copies of the copies we have are relatively close to the oldest VERSION that survived the stewardship of the early church with its bias, self-interest, and willingness to destroy and murder in order to preserve itself.

If we listen to the bible, and judge them by their fruits, the church does not fair very well for it's first ~1800 years.


2) that God is, by definition, a god of maximal goodness as it is conceived (by some) to be such. It is patently absurd to expect this to be granted presumption as it is neither self-evidence, nor supportable by rational evidence, nor even widely accepted as true (much less the consensus, as much as Craig wishes it to be so -- but you can't get an IS from a wishful OUGHT Mr Craig).


My take on is-ought: OUGHTS exist in our minds because of the ability of our minds to perceive the IS of others. I'll go against Huxley and others here and argue that our morality exists as a PRODUCT of evolutionary processes. This is NOT the Naturalistic Fallacy because I'm not saying that because things happen in Nature they are moral or good.

Huxley rejected evolutionary-based morality (Evolution and Ethics, 1893) arguing that evolution only produces what is, but doesn't define how we Ought to behave towards one another (see also the Naturalistic Fallacy). I think that this is based on an overly simplistic and limited view of evolution, limited by the knowledge of Huxley's time. Huxley was not aware of Strange Attractors in dynamic equations, he was not aware of genetics as we understand them today (they had only a very basic idea that traits could be inherited), he was not aware of neuroscience, he was not aware of cellular mechanics or development, and he was unaware of the level to which genetics, epigenetics, and experiences form and shape human behavior and thought.

So it is not evolution alone that defines morality, but the fact that it created brains which are capable of taking in information about their surroundings, forming memories of those events, executing processes which effect decisions, modeling the environment with predictive algorithms.

Imagine if you will a normal human, your good friend perhaps. A more self-less, giving, loving person you cannot imagine knowing. That person is in a car crash and tragically suffers extensive brain damage. After their physical recovery they are not all the same person. They might not even recognize you, they might be angry or even dangerous - perhaps they harm someone else in a fit of rage. Surely, their actions are beyond the control of the loving person you once knew and loved? Are they as fully morally culpable as the person you once knew and loved? Surely not, the structural changes in their brain have clearly resulted in changes in moral culpability.

But why should some change in mere physical structure of organic matter magically decouple us from (at least some level of) moral culpability?


The combination of our mental faculties, which I described above, means that a normal human being can form objective conclusions about the needs of others by a process of observation of what IS, combined with a projection of the consequences of actions. If these abilities are lost then that person can no longer make those decisions and, as Craig correctly points out, OUGHT implies CAN.

And THAT is the critical realization of moral understanding: we either CAN or we CANNOT. And every bit of neuroscience points to the fact that our ability to do something is based on Natural processes within our brain. If we did not have literally millions of facts that point in this direction you might be excused for assuming otherwise (say, in the late-1800's). We understand (computers evidence this) how aggregations of physical processes can learn, store memories, and make decisions. We also, interestingly, do not require computers to assume moral culpability. The idea almost seems ridiculous (at present), but why should that be so?

I would argue that computers currently do not have a fully closed-loop system, they cannot make observations and project the consequences of actions and make decisions based on that data. They have not been wired up to do so, once they are they would and should become culpable for their actions even though they are STILL exactly the same lump of computational dynamics they are today -- therefore the difference is something that is emergent from the specific dynamics.

Some dynamics CAN, and some CANNOT. Normal human brains CAN, damaged human brains CANNOT.

If Harris is correct, and maximal suffering would be an undesirable state for conscious beings (and that seems self-evident to me as *I* know that I prefer not to suffer), then actions which we CAN take that will lessen suffering and move us towards well-being would be OUGHTS. Harris argues that those actions would objectively (and measurably) move us towards well-being even if mindless actors were performing them.

The question is, can Natural evolutionary processes (reproduction, modification, and selection) generate entities which can deduce these actions - and I find the arguments in favor of evolution to be overwhelmingly positive. That is, have amoral physical processes yielded a computational system capable of observation, memory, prediction, decision, and action and should such systems objectively converge on the same core principles of action of right & wrong actions.

Even more problematical for the god-premise would be the existence of moral dilemma's and that, to the extent that ethical systems attempt to be logically complete and consistent they will necessarily fail pray to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Harris touched on these issues in the debate and in his book as well.

But perhaps a better question is, does it even matter if morality is objective or subjective? I don't think that it really does. If it IS subjective then it is so because we are merely made of physical stuff following physical rules and we really HAVE no choice any way. Science is replete with examples of observations that have flown in the face of the common wisdom. You cannot make a logical argument from first principles that Nature MUST contain an objective moral foundation. It either it DOES or it DOES NOT, and if it is knowable then that knowledge can only come from the most careful of observations of Nature itself.

This is just my quick, rambling, take on it - my apologies for what I'm sure will be many typos.

The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule (also known as reciprocity) is flawed - it is imperfect. That doesn't mean it can't be an ok idea but it means it is not the end-all and be-all of moral/ethical guides.

It really only works if your own moral/ethical code is ALREADY fair and desirable by all parties. At best it says that you should expect to receive whatever you dish out, which is hardly transcendent. It also conflicts with 'Turn the other cheek' (which is a much more transcendent ethical concept, but one I rarely see anyone trying to follow unless they are trying to get into a frat).

The positive formulation is the best known:

One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself

No, no, no. I do not want Christians to treat ME the way they treat each other. I do not want Muslims to treat ME the way they treat each other. I do not want Jewish persons to treat ME the way they treat each other.

I do not want to be subjected to THEIR ideas of good behavior. I want to be treated the way *I* want to be treated, according to MY ideals. At that point, it becomes a negotiation obviously.


And in the negative form (sometimes called the Silver rule):

One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated

This is a little better, but what if I would be happy to be treated in a way you DON'T want to be treated? I like to argue, I have a sharp tongue and I'm happy to use it and I'm happy to have other people do the same to me, it makes me laugh. I don't have a problem with it, but some people do.

Again, it works best as a negotiation.

And combining the two doesn't improve the situation -- in BOTH cases the Golden Rule basically leaves it up to the subjective experience of the actor. This is simply a poor approach to a good moral code.

One can even find a better code in the rather inane (but funny) movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" which states: Be Excellent To Each Other (thanks to n8wide for reminding me of that one). It doesn't define what 'excellent' might be but at least hints at being better than just what YOU want done or don't want done.

Emanuel Kant took a crack at correcting these issues with his categorical imperative. I would argue that he failed in part because, for the most part, we do not want people to make real sacrifices for us. Would you want your child to sacrifice his/her own life for you? I wouldn't. But they probably would feel differently. It is our desire to sacrifice for others beyond what others might wish that gives us part of our humanity.

So I feel like the Golden Rule really only HINTS at aspects of our moral/ethical systems that we like to think we possess, but it really doesn't embody much truth in itself.


See also: Limits of the Golden Rule


To put it succinctly, while the "Golden Rule" is a brilliant distillation of our ethical impulses-it is for exactly that reason that it is an abject failure as moral guide as our behavior is only as good as the underlying ethical impulses. One must look to hone and justify those underlying ethical impulses and for that one must look to the consequences of actions.


So what's better than the Golden Rule?  Well, I would start with two principles:

Careful observation of the consequences of our actions.

Cooperatively defining the best behaviors we can identify.

Those are important aspects of any ethical system.  Perhaps sometime I'll do a longer post specifically on morality but I think many secular authors have already covered it more in-depth than I can in a blog.

Basically, I would treat it as a science.

Something From Nothing

It is often derisively claimed that 'atheists' believe that something came from nothing (despite the fact that "creatio ex nihilo" has been Catholic dogma for centuries).

Of course this is utterly ridiculous because what atheists actually believe is that theists have not met a reasonable burden of proof for their claims -- atheism itself doesn't proclaim to KNOW anything about the origin of the universe.

But as I see it, There are only two options that have been put forth:

(1) In the beginning there was absolutely and truly nothing, not the vacuum of space, not time, and NOT god but truly NOTHING. And then out of this absolute NOTHINGNESS sprang the SOMETHING that now constitutes ultimate reality. This SOMETHING may be our universe or it could even be a precursor that existed for mere moments or even unimaginably vast amounts of 'time' before our current universe.

or

(2) There was NO beginning. Whatever "is" is, is eternal (take that Bill Clinton). And by that I mean that ultimate reality must be SOMETHING and that something would have to be eternal. That SOMETHING may or may not be our spacetime.


Neither option can really be said to be 'more likely' since we have absolutely no frame of reference from which to judge such things. We can go on our own intuition but even extremely well-educated and intelligent individuals could disagree.

I am actually partial to (2) despite constant assertions by theists that atheists "must" believe that something came from nothing. In my view of (2), Universes sometimes spring quantumly from the eternal void (in a similar fashion to virtual particles) with a relatively infrequent intensity that unleashes something along the lines of the proposed quintessence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics) ) which causes a rapid, inflationary period in the early burst of energy that prevents the normal quantum collapse. [note that the void in this case is NOT the vacuum of space]

In this model our universe sprung from the void as an energetic fluctuation so violent it created its own spacetime. The remainder of the energy twisted into nanoscopic vortices which have continued to whirl for billions of years, twisting into ever heavier particles through gravitationally powered fusion and then exploding again and again until enough of their energy was spent that the earth could form out of the fiery violence and then cool to the point where organic chemistry could continue the dance at an ever finer pace, with ever more detail until, in a sense, we have crystallized out of the substance of the universe.

I see no need in all of this for a personal, theistic god, who bothers to answer poorly conceived, ignorantly vile, and conflicting prayers; who watches us pathetic humans with a critical eye jotting down every time someone masturbates for later retribution on their 'soul'; who creates us with a flaw, damns us for having it, and nearly destroys us. And then for a small band of relatively ignorant humans to claim that THEY know the mind of this god and THEY know this gods Will and Wishes, and that they are now his authority on earth over all others... And then, to ice the cake, after many claimed millennia of this god being AT THEIR SIDE (winning battles, slaughtering first-born, Engineering great vessels, flooding the entire Earth with an unimaginable quantity of water which then disappears, turning water into wine (I thought yeast did that), we're supposed to believe that just because we have scientific methods now that this god has gotten shy and gone completely undetectable?

I believe that we are responsible for our own actions and that we are held accountable to our human morals by society. There are 'right' and 'wrong' actions for humans but these moral concepts are creations of human brains and derive from our ability to formulate fairly accurate predictions of behaviors and consequences for actions.

If it were absolutely wrong to murder then it would have been WRONG for god to command Abraham to murder Isaac. And yes, I know god cheated in the end but it was STILL WRONG for god to have commanded it and it's wrong for people to consider this a work of any moral authority when it repeatedly commands murder, genocide, infanticide, genital mutilation, rape, and many other horrors and NEGLECTS to mention anything about things such as microbes.

But in the process of evolution humans have acquired a sense of empathy and compassion because having those allowed us to operate more effectively as a social group which has allowed us to survive. And we have, therefore, collectively agreed that murder is not one of the things we want to tolerate. And thankfully we have moved past the more ignorant "morality" of the bible. For example, we no longer force a virgin to marry her rapist or force him to pay a bride price to the father. Those things were NEVER moral, NEVER acceptable, and NEVER divinely commanded. They were the unfortunate laws of the time. Thank GOODness we have moved past them.

Human morality is constantly shifting, and changing, and adapting to the situation.

3000 years ago murdering other humans en masse was justified in THEIR minds. They were, in a sense, protecting their own. It wasn't morally right by todays standards but THEY didn't have much of a problem with it (although I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered probably objected). They also had little or no compunction against enslaving their enemies. Or beating them, sometimes to death.

And then things got really twisted up in their minds. They decided that, with their 'newly' found moral senses, they would make laws. Laws like, if your child is disobedient you can stone them to death. Laws like, women should be silent and subservient to men. Laws like, how much you can charge when you sell your daughter into sexual slavery. And Laws about taking slaves from your conquests. By ANY modern standard, these are immoral and primitive codes. EVERY modern Christian (sect) cherry picks through the Old Testament books and decided, based on nothing more than their own innate, modern sense of right and wrong, which of those codes they will decide still apply and of those which they still accept they redefine the appropriate punishments for them (very few modern Christian sects still hold to stoning people to death although they DO still exist).

And a few Islamic cultures (and other religions as well) also still practice stoning to death. They consider these actions moral, not just moral by human standards, but ORDERED by god and thus RIGHT by definition that CANNOT be questioned. Anyone who dares to question this authority is also Stoned to Death of course.

And even if modern Christians do not generally stone people to death they still follow this same kind of ignorant logic to equally ignorant conclusions about what is morally right because THEY believe it is ordered to be so by their "god" (because it is written in a book, written from 3500-1800 years ago approximately). And they ironically consider Themselves persecuted when challenged or asked to justify these beliefs.

Don't get me wrong, certainly not ALL christians nor ALL muslims are bad people (not even most of them) but they ALL support systems that are corrupted, violent, and by modern standards, evil. They also teach falsehoods, that even they don't claim to know directly or have ANY direct proof, as the truth. It IS folly and it SHOULD be unacceptable in this day and age.

If you really must believe in some kind of nebulous supreme power that is just fine with me. Be Deistic (god exists and created everything but is letting things run their course and has no influence over us and doesn't judge us) or Pantheistic (god is essentially everything, god is the universe and the laws of physics) or whatever floats your boat.

But PLEASE stop trying to claim any kind of personal and direct authority over others on the basis that you claim to know what this being might want from us.