Atheist Morals? Don ' t Read This Unless You Are Very Brave
By- Dean Van Drasek
I see postings all the time about how atheists are“ better” than believers because they have lower rates of divorce, abortion, criminal convictions, parking in handicapped parking zones, kicking sleeping dogs, and of going in through the out door. I’ m sorry, but who decided that any of these things are good? Is there some atheist bible laying around telling us that divorce and abortion are bad, or are some people just still mired in the mindset of Christianity and Islam and continue to assume that these things are bad. If your morality comes from a religion, then by all means just stay in that religion, because you are a marginal atheist at best. You dropped the concept of a supernatural agency-god- but you seem to be determined to live up to god’ s commandments, or at least some of them, in the same way as believers pick and choose those religious laws they want to follow.
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris contend that atheists have some innate form of ethics, which is superior to those of the religious. Atheism lacks the moralistic absolutes and imperatives often found in primitive holy scriptures, like stoning disobedient children, committing genocide against your otherbelieving neighbors, and marrying your rape victim, among others. They often dub it as some form of“ humanism,” but you will be hard pressed to find a definitive definition of what this is or who determines its parameters. Is this true, that atheists have some socially constructed morality( most of us developed within a society dominated by religion, remember?), or are they afraid of a real debate on the value of ethics? I will let Frederick Nietzsche, the most stridently atheist of the modern philosophers, show us the way. Perhaps by the end, you will know whether you are still a slave to religion, despite disavowing god.
Nietzsche and Existentialism
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