Can an atheist be moral?

3 Responses to Can an atheist be moral?

1. davidlee says:

   December 18, 2011 at 11:08 am

   A replacement for Hitch. A little more time on the sticks and pow! We can have a new horsewoman of the Apocalypse.

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2. Marnie says:

   December 18, 2011 at 12:37 pm

   Michael Shermer’s “The Science of Good and Evil” does a great job of elaborating on these core ideas. Of course, I would argue that the burden of proof is not on non believers to disprove the claim, it is on believers to prove it.

   Being religious doesn’t make you more or less likely to commit a crime. Humans have had laws and morals long before the advent of any of the abrahamic religions and laws and morals exist and have existed without the influence of any of the abrahamic religions around the world. Many immoral things have been done not just by christians but in the name of christianity and in parts of the world, aspects of the old and new testament are still used to justify war, genocide, suppression of women, slavery, homophobia, child abuse and countless other actions that the vast majority of us consider immoral.

   Before any of us need to worry about proving we can be good without god, religious people need to prove that being religious makes one moral.

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3. Charlie says:

   December 18, 2011 at 7:05 pm

   In the book “Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind” by Donald Johanson, the author and his colleagues propose an idea regarding human evolution. It was basically a web. Larger brain size requires more time to learn to use the brain, hence longer childhood, hence longer care required. More time spent on child care requires support from others in the group, and longer childhood leads to play to learn to use the brain, so we need rules that everyone in the society follows. This, I think, is the evolutionary basis for morality. Additional factors in the web were female receptiveness to sex, decrease number of children, and possibly others.
   I apologize for the incompleteness of the above. The web was a fascinating diagram that I would open up to and just follow the arrows.

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