Atheism and Morality

One of the first questions that people often ask of Atheists is, "If you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals?"  It's easy to think like this as a theist because many Christians are taught that all morals extend from God.  Some preachers may even go as far as to explicitly claim that Atheists are anti-moral, which opens a whole other subject up for discussion that I will cover later.  But for right now, let's simply examine morality.  It's very important to a logical and critical thinker to be very clear about definitions before proceeding with any particular discussion.  Theists are often fast and loose with definitions, sometimes even presenting definitions of words that don't fit at all.  If we're to make any sense of things, we have to agree on standardized definitions and be sure we know what we are talking about before we try to think about it in depth and analyze it.

Morality is defined as, "principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."  As a theist, we would tend to want to place our understanding of what is moral and what isn't on the Bible.  Calvinism is the idea within many Christian circles that God is completely good and incapable of evil.  Therefore, God himself can be considered the whole of morality.  But, is that really true?  How can we test that and how can we figure out where morality fits in when we no longer believe in religion?

It's a multi-layered problem, actually.  There are quite a number of issues with Theism that allow people to arrive at the idea that the Christian god is essentially the origin of everything moral.  The problem is that, as Theists, we often didn't realize that we were actually looking at it backward.  The claim is that we got morality from our religion, but in fact, we were using our own societal understandings of morality to validate what we found to be moral from the Bible.  This is easy enough to test and demonstrate.  No Theist will challenge the idea that God is eternal, the alpha and the  omega, the beginning and the end.  If God is morality, then anything moral to God should be moral to people.  Yet that simply isn't true.  

For example, if a parent murdered their child because the child talked back to them, they would be put in prison, possibly for life, and society at large would consider it a very heinous act.  Yet, God commanded his followers to stone unruly children to death.  Obviously,the apologist in us all immediately tries to make the excuse, "But that's Old Testament", but it doesn't really matter.  What was moral to God in the OT had to have been moral to God in the NT.  If God is morality, then what was moral must still be moral.  What was moral 2,000 years ago will be moral in another 2,000 years from now.  Yet, in the OT, God provides Moses with the 10 primary commandments and nobody would argue that it is moral to say, "Thou shalt not steal".  So, why the contradiction?  How can we only consider some of what God says to be moral if all our morals come from God?

That's because we are using our morals to judge what is moral in the Bible, then looking at it backward and saying that those morals CAME from the Bible when, in fact, it was us making the moral determination all along.  There was never a requirement of religion to be moral or to understand morality in the first place.  Atheists have no regard for what a priest has to say about their religion, yet the Bible states that such people are to be executed.  That is directly at odds morally with our modern sense of equality, fairness, and our constitutional right to free speech.  So, really, we've had morality misrepresented to us our entire lives and this is just one of the many aspects that has often been viewed by Atheists as betrayals of religion.  

So, as an Atheist then, where DO we get our morals from?  The same place other people get them from.  We get them from an evaluation of what is good and bad.  While there can be many differing opinions about "harm", that really is the founding basis upon which we have to determine if something is moral.  It's obviously quite complex, but to strip it down to the lowest level, we can say that we can define something as immoral if it brings actual harm to a person in some fashion, and something is moral if it helps them or is good for them.  For example, if I were to walk up to you and punch you in the mouth, it would actually harm you.  That means it's a very immoral thing to do.  It's immoral not only because it causes harm, but because of what we understand from the most basic rule - the Golden Rule.  If you don't want someone to punch you in the mouth, you should not do it to someone else.  Nobody requires a religious book to tell them this very basic concept and we as Atheists do not require religion to be able to understand this.  

What is moral does change and it's based on societal rules.  For example, in many ancient societies, voluntary ritual human sacrifice was commendable and honorable, a very moral thing.  But this isn't just limited to ancient vs. modern times.  There are still antiquated beliefs in present day which modern society deems immoral.  While a discussion of societal structures is beyond the scope of this blog, it's important to note that the scope of what we're discussing is modern-day U.S.A. which is 76% Christian.

So, to leave you with a final thought about morality, consider that morality has nothing to do with our previous lives as Christians in the sense that the religion itself is not moral.  Christianity's system is "If you believe and are baptized, you are saved.  Otherwise, you're damned."  That is not a moral system.  It's a system of favoritism.  Adolf Hitler could repent and be baptized on his deathbed and go to heaven, and Ghandi would be sent to hell for eternity because he didn't believe in the Christian god.  There is no morality or fairness in that.

In conclusion, our morality as Atheists stems from our understanding that we live on a planet with billions of other people and our actions have an effect on each other.  The moral thing to do is to behave in a way which brings about good things and doesn't harm ourselves or others.  It's obviously a very complex thing because we are very complex beings, but moral Atheists exist just as much as immoral Christians exist.  It's not the belief, or lack of belief, in God that makes one moral.