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Are atheists moral?

It is often claimed that atheists have no morality, that morality only makes sense through God, that a universal morality exists through God, or that God gave us morality.

All of this is nonsense. (Hey, it's my blog, I can be as blunt as I like!) Let us deal with the last point, that morality comes from God. This statement is meaningless, since God is "everything we don't understand", which says that we don't understand morality. This is factually false, evolutionary psychology does give us a reason for morality. Even if God for some reason wanted us to behave in certain ways (why exactly he would want that escapes me), then how would that be communicated to us? Through prayer? Through stones carted down from Mt Synae? Through the Bible?

The problem with appealing to God is that there are differing religions, each telling their flock different things. There is no reason to suppose that one religion has a connection to God, whilst other religions are simply misguided. I would argue that they are all misguided. What they have in common, apart from a perceived moral superiority over other groups, are to basically love one another and stop being so selfish.

Atheists of course have a sense of right and wrong. It is not just a utilitarian desire to not end up in jail, it is because I don't like to see other people suffer. Besides, I would gain far more by cooperating with people than by conniving against them. Generally, human relationships count far more than material possessions, even for atheists. What right do religions have to claim these values as their own?

These values do not come from God. Well, they come from God in the sense that everything comes from God, which is basically a meaningless statement. Behaviours are actually evolved. Since every human characteristic is subject to natural selection, then the same is also true of our behavioural characteristics. Community, love of our family, and a degree of selflessness are all good for our survival. Our characteristics weren't given to us by God at all!

I would even argue that religious people are less moral than atheists, since they spend their time worrying about unimportant things like in which direction to pray, which food to eat, building buildings for worship, subjugating women and despising other people to the point of violence, all of which are not of any benefit to anybody.

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