I would like to touch upon something often brought up in conversations with hyper-religious persons when discussing the relative pros and cons of belief and non-belief, specifically with the claim that:
‘Atheists have no morals: moral authority can only come from [my favourite god]. Therefor to the atheist there is no right or wrong.’ (And I assure you I am not straw-manning on this one; it pops up on a regular basis).
This statement got me thinking; it is obviously false as I, and other atheists can and do make moral choices about our actions or events which intrude upon our lives. The difference between a secular moral philosophy and a religious moral doctrine (and I use the two differing terms of philosophy and doctrine purposefully) is that the former is based on the principle of subjective morality, and the latter on an objective, absolute morality (generally speaking).
My set of moral beliefs are based on a number of factors; my experiences & knowledge, my ability to reason, my ability to empathise with others (as limited as some people would claim that is). It is, to an extent, fluid, flexible; open to discussion and reasoned debate (and yes, argument too). There are some things that my moral conscience can never condone such as murder, rape, torture, slavery. But that is based upon my compassion and empathy, amongst other things; my ability to reason that to inflict one of these actions upon another human being would bring them great pain and suffering, as it would to me. These are values shared by most people, regardless of religion or lack thereof.
But if we look at the moral mind set of fervent, fundamental religious believers; they do not get to make moral choices, responsibility is taken from them. In the eyes of the fundamentalist their god is the only being withmoral authority. An act is not judged good or moral based upon its relative merits, but upon whether their god deems it be so or not. From here, everything falls in to the two categories of right and wrong (perhaps phrased sinful/not sinful).
This has the unfortunate effect of forcing the believer to consider a variety of horrific acts to be just and proper such as the mass killings and genocides of the Christian Bible. Anything their god does or commands to be done is good, as only their god can judge what is good (a fine example of circular reasoning).
So for a fundamentalist there are no decisions to make as to an acts morality; only the question: ‘Does my god approve?’ To answer this question they must look to their holy book or to clerics and theologians. These priests and scholars themselves can only ask the same question, then interpret and argue over scripture until they arrive at what they believe their god thinks. At no point is there any rational debate or reasoning upon whatever issue prompted the question, it is almost irrelevant in and of itself (an example of this could be the opposition to abortion even if the life of the mother is in jeopardy). To some believers, the mothers’ life is irrelevant; abortion is always a sin in their god’s eyes.
That is why I take the position that religious beliefs (particularly those of a fundamental nature) are anathema to making reasoned, healthy moral choices; the kind we should all be striving to make in our society.
That is all.
*Edited, because my grammar sucks: and I hate that*
A Node of Ranvier 