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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: one_less who wrote (79857)12/29/2003 7:44:14 PM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 82486
 
She said that ethical morality comes from what is prescribed by law.

I didn't say that.

I asked Karen where atheistic ethics originate.

There are no atheistic ethics. There is no code whatsoever for atheists. Atheism, as I have repeatedly said, is simply the absence of belief in God.

Individual atheists have ethics of some sort or another. Each gets his ethics from what he is taught at his mother's knee, what he learns from interacting with the world, what he learns from literature and philosophy, what he has within himself whether intuition or common sense or genes or whatever it is. He puts it together and that becomes his ethics.

Where those individual bits and pieces come from varies and are to some extent unknown and unknowable. They are things that make sense and feel right.

In summary, the individual atheist designs and internalizes his own system of ethics. Generally, it doesn't vary all that much from what his religious peers use. Those bits and pieces come from wherever they come from. It matters not.



To: one_less who wrote (79857)12/29/2003 10:32:57 PM
From: Lazarus_Long  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 82486
 
Suppose there is no god but there does exist a species of social sentient apes.

Do you not think they would, as time goes on, work out better and better sets of rules binding on one another for their mutual benefit?

Is it not possible they might even invent God to get the less bright or more superstitious among them to adhere to the code?