mattlikespie wrote:
Nah don't think so. This reminds me along the lines of atheists who claim they have no religion and believe in no faith. But in reality - is there really a thing as true atheism? Morals are pulled largely religion. So say, a person raised Christian but turned atheist - their entire life was based on Christian morals. As an atheist, do you throw that away? Probably not. I don't really see atheists killing people and stealing shit because they genuinely think that killing people is the right thing to do.
Nononon, on all that, whether there is true atheism isn't a moral question and is separate from what else you're saying, Christianity can be a source of morality (a bad one), but it isn't the only one, this kinda brings it back to the OP question, as in we all have to chose a moral system, because in so far as I've seen there is no absolute morality.
I'll establish this for religion here: I'd say that is because morality is a human made construct, like a racing competition, we decide what we want to achieve with it and we make up rules for it, it's not something inherent, so it will always be subjective.
Even if you derive your moral system from religion, it still isn't absolute & objective, because: they were still subjectively decided on by your deity, you have no proof that your morality is verifiable and measurably true, like for ex. physics is. There are multiple religions with conflicting morality, and you still have to subscribe to a religion before you can assert it's morality in this way (you cannot be an atheist and still agree to a religious morality being absolute or applying objectively).
It's entirely possible to construct a morality where you'd want to keep other people protected without needing your morality to come from religion, historically that's actually how we obtained our current western general morality. Example: Other humans are a resource, they provide infrastructure that improves my life, I want my life to be better, thus I should not kill other people. Religious morality would be subjective here too btw (try and argue the same with no subjectivity, you can't) like in all cases as I explained.
For an atheistic person we can argue Cooper's 1st paragraph with which I more or less agree.
I disagree morals are pulled originally and/or mainly from religion, rather I'd argue religion has incorporated certain previously existing morality into it's structure, this is irrefutably true, because a morality has to be conceived of before it can be communicated, this also applies to any parts of said morality. In this sense I will concede that certain religions contains some morality in general use today. Everything else should be obvious, it isn't the sole source of morality, and some of religious morality even has been adjusted to keep up with other sources of morality considered superior (Bible contains apprehensive morality, no longer popularized by mainstream Christianity).
Also what do you mean by true atheism?
Doldol
