I think you probably know a surprising number of atheists and don't know it. Many of us simply keep quiet about it because of the prejudice that exists. We are viewed as no more evil and immoral than anyone else, we lead ordinary lives, and our friends, family, co workers, and acquaintences would be shocked to learn we have no god belief.
Is this just unfounded conjecture, wishful thinking, or do you have some evidence that there are a lot of closet atheists out there (in which case they aren't really closet atheists are they?)?
The quietly hidden atheists are no worse than people who believe in god or gods.
I find it implausible that you know the moral status of persons we supposedly don't even know exist!
My point was that god belief was not the major determining factor in whether a person was ethical or moral. I think it has more to do with upbringing, environment, peers, consequences, and other factors.
But you didn't give us anything that would support that point.
I don't know "lots" of atheists. I guess "lots" should be qualified. Over 20? And they all have said to you that they believe no gods exist? Or are they just non religious? Some people just don't do anything religious or think about it much but they do believe a god exists.
Yes. Self-proclaimed atheists. But Christians will (or should) object to lumping a person who *just* happens to believe in God with someone who takes that belief seriously as playing a fundamental role in their identity (what you might call "religious"). The Bible itself makes a distinction between *mere* belief that God exists and the type of belief that defines a Christian.
So James 2:19 says "Even the demons believe—and shudder!" Now obviously it would be silly if you were to lump demons (taking their existence granted for the sake of argument) into the same category as Christians and then make sweeping judgments on that "group as a whole." Any points you could make from such a broad generalization would be trivial and irrelevant to Christianity qua Christianity.
If persons believe God exists in some detached sense that "don't do anything religious" (as you put it) then this merely shows that they aren't acting out their beliefs. Clearly, if a person isn't acting upon their beliefs, it is misguided to judge their beliefs based on their actions: for as you've defined it there simply is no relationship between the two for these type of people.
I agree that one might use a different measure of morality than another. I was trying to speak more in generalities, rather than theological hair-splitting. I will leave the questions of dogma differences to religious debaters. There are varieties of Christians who think it is sinful for a woman to cut her hair or don't believe in using electricity.
Red-herring fallacy. I didn't mention differences between theological systems of ethics. Rather, I gave an example of differences between theologically informed ethics and non-theologically informed ethics. That's not accountable on "theological hair-splitting" since one party doesn't have (in an obvious sense) a theological system at all.
So the only sense it is a "dogma difference" is in a sense that captures you atheists as having dogmas too: ethical dogmas. Your throwing up the thing about hair cuts is irrelevant to the point and, thus, looks like an attempted red-herring.
When I referred to morals or morality, I meant the everyday behavior of the average person in their interactions with other people and the big obvious things like killing or theft or violence.
Not sure what your point is. Surely you don't mean something like: (morality = everyday behavior of the average person). In that case, things like lying are moral and for students things like cheating are moral since both are statistically average.
Yes, all humans lie, cheat, hurt others. It is the degree to which someone does it and how much it is impacting themselves and others.
So things like lying and cheating are not wrong until they are done to a certain degree and/or it impacts themselves and others to a certain degree? That sounds awfully fuzzy and arbitrary.
And I disagree that those without god belief do not regret their mistakes or ways in which they have hurt others [...]
I don't recall saying that this was the case, so I don't see who you are disagreeing with.
[...]or that they have no framework with which to build a moral compass and come back to it.
Sure, an atheist can build whatever framework she wants and call that her moral compass. The question is whether she can do so non-arbitrarily in a way that connects her to objective morality.
How do you account for the non-Christian worldview (that includes god belief) that also has a basis for judging acts as wrong---and they are very similar in the basics (murder, theft etc)
How do I account for their moral ontology or moral epistemology? Concerning moral ontology, it's simply the case that certain types of theism are able to ground moral facts. Concerning epistemology, I think I already answered this last time when I said:
"Romans 2 teaches that God has written the work of the law on the hearts of all men."
But I did not invent my own moral code. I learned it from my family, my experiences, my society.
I don't recall saying that "you" "invented" your own moral code. Only that your justifications (assuming an evolutionary explanation of ethics) will only explain why you (and people in general) happen to think something is wrong. In other words, the evolutionary explanation simply explains why people happen to think they way they do. It doesn't give you anything normative about how they *should* think.
You may have learned it from your family etc, but that you learned it doesn't make it objective. These same influences were probably operating on a young Hitler.
I think there are basics which human beings have come to agree on, because practicing these behaviors tends to result in more peace and harmony among people.
This still doesn't get you to the existence of moral facts. At best, this gets us to what some moral philosophers might call a hypothetical imperative. In a hypothetical imperative if you want to achieve x you should do y, but you have no obligation or responsibility to achieve x. So, for example, if I want to fold 1,000 paper cranes I should obtain a certain amount of paper. Or if I want to go to the mall today I should exit my house at some point. Or, if you want more peace and harmony you should not lie or cheat. These hypothetical imperatives aren't themselves moral imperatives as far as I can see, because we usually don't think of moral imperatives as being conditional upon what a person wants.
And if that were the case, then it's not clear to me that anyone ever acts immorally, since persons either do a wrong action because they wanted to or they do a wrong action because they were coerced to do so. Now if they did a wrong action because they wanted to then they simply didn't meet the condition for the imperative to be binding on them. Thus, they aren't guilty of doing wrong. If they did a wrong action because they were coerced to, then they aren't guilty of wrong doing since they didn't do it freely. So either way one tries to go looks like a dead end for morality.
I don't agree. I don't think god-belief necessarily informs anyone as to why humans do wrong things.
I didn't say god-belief tells us why humans do wrong things. I said the Christian worldview is able to explain why humans universally and objectively are guilty of wrongdoing. Obviously I didn't mean that the Christian worldview explains why humans do wrong simply by pointing to other human beliefs. Rather, it explains why humans do wrong by appealing to the existence of God and the nature of man as defined by Scripture. Given these facts, universal wrongdoing is something we would expect. It's something we can explain.
Humans can be impulsive, selfish, self-destructive and any number of other things related to psychology, experience, opportunity, and maturity.
But you have no reason to expect them to do this (unless you take a strict behaviorist route, in which case I don't see that you would have any hope of improving anyone's (including your own) condition) or way to account for the objective existence of such categories in the first place.
I would pose this question:
Does God's measure of morality change or is it perfect and unchanging?
God's measure of morality doesn't change.
The Bible's Ten Commandments don't mention rape or slavery. It seems slavery was acceptable in the Bible.
The ten commandments were a summary of basic principles. They weren't meant to be the exhaustive guidance for the community and this should be clear from the fact that no community could operate if these ten commandments were the extent of their legal code. For example, no penal laws are given and no process for determining if these things have been violated. This is why the ten commandments are followed by a lot of other laws, often called "case laws." But even these case laws are not exhaustive. As Samuel Greengus explains:
"The biblical law collections, even when considered in toto, fall short of including all of the legal areas operative in ancient Israelite society. There are, first of all, categories which appear in the ANE [ancient near eastern] laws but which are absent or unregulated in the OT law collections. Many of these categories are, however, alluded to in the Bible; thus, it is certain that they were operative in Israelite society… Some of the other “missing laws” also appear in the Mishnah. While one cannot assert that all regulations of the Mishnah go back to the biblical period, some laws apparently do, at least to the extent that they can be shown to have ANE parallels… The biblical law collections... are all represented as part of orally delivered addresses or sermons. The renewal or rereading of the law is similarly depicted; the laws are read out to the populace in Deut 31:10–13, 2 Kgs 23:1–3, and Neh 8:1–9:3. So it would seem that in ancient Israel, as for her Near Eastern neighbors, writing was not an indispensable feature of the legal tradition and practice but functioned, rather, as an aid to memory (cf. Deut 31:22–26; Josh 24:26)."
(Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary).
Douglas Stuart makes the same point:
"Modern societies generally have opted for exhaustive law codes. That is, every action modern society wishes to regular or prohibit must be specifically mentioned in a separate law...Ancient laws did not work this way. They were paradigmatic, giving models of behaviors and models of prohibitions/punishments relative to those behaviors, but they made no attempt to be exhaustive. Ancient laws gave guiding principles, or samples, rather than complete descriptions of all things regulated"
(Exodus 442).
So that the ten commandments don't mention rape is irrelevant. Rape is mentioned in other expositions of law in the Bible as a punishable crime, sometimes by death (Deut. 22:25-27). Slavery is also mentioned in other expositions of the law. While slavery was permissible, man-stealing (or "kidnapping") and selling into slavery wasn't permissible (it was punishable by death: Ex. 21:16).
There is a Bible verse exhorting God's followers to dash out the brains of the enemies children against rocks. Is violence against children ever moral? Is slavery ever moral?
Yes, violence against children may be moral under certain conditions (e.g. spanking as punishment, or if God commands for his theocratic community to execute death as a punishment). Conversely, I don't see that an atheist has no grounds to say violence against children is immoral under any conditions.
However, it's not clear that the passages you have in mind aren't hyperbole. The argument is made from parallel language in other ANE accounts that this sort of language was common war-time hyperbole. In these parallel ANE accounts, they are able to document that such practices did not take place, even though language to that effect was used. Thus, it was equivalent to us saying something like "Barcelona slaughtered Real Madrid" (two football teams) in our common use of terms. You can read "Is God a Moral Monster?" by Paul Copan to see a more detailed argument for this (and other moral issues).
I would argue that morals DO evolve over time as societies become more advanced. If this moral code were unchanging and perfect and written on every human's heart, then slavery would not be immoral if it wasn't in Biblical times.
1. Slavery would still be permissible today if people wanted to practice it in the biblical fashion. In this case, a person who had gotten themselves into too much debt could sell themselves (or their labor) to their creditors. Or prisoners of war could do forced labor until settlements were reached. In fact, we already do practice something like this form of slavery when prisoners enter work programs. But this isn't anything like slavery as it was practiced a few hundred years ago. That sort of slavery involved man-stealing where, for the most part, Muslims kidnapped Africans and sold them to Europeans and Americans. This sort of slavery was punishable by death in the Old Testament.
2. Whether slavery is immoral is a different issue than whether slavery is permissible. The law code in the Old Testament allowed certain things that were immoral as an accommodation to human (moral) limitations. In fact, all law codes do this. The U.S. law code doesn't prohibit all things Americans deem immoral. As Gordon Wenham explains:
“The law sets a minimum standard of behaviour, which if transgressed attracts sanction…What legislators and judges tolerate may not be what they approve. Laws generally set a floor for behaviour within society, they do not prescribe an ethical ceiling. Thus a study of the legal codes within the Bible is unlikely to disclose the ideals of the law-givers, but only the limits of their tolerance: if you do such and such, you will be punished. The laws thus tend to express the limits of socially acceptable behaviour: they do not describe ideal behavior,”
(Story as Torah, 80).
3. It's not clear that you aren't confusing moral judgments with the moral code (in a certain sense of "moral code"). If when you say "morals DO evolve over time" you mean the moral code *as a universal standard* evolves over time then you clearly have no basis for saying that this evolution is an advancement, for you would then need a moral code transcending the new code and the old code in order to evaluate the two (or more) codes! This is nonsensical and I would normally assume that you didn't mean "moral code" in this objective sense; rather, you meant "moral code" as in what humans think to be moral. But that you mean this isn't clear given the context of the Bible's moral code, which you brought up, that isn't simply a codification of what we think to be moral.
But even if you mean "moral code" as "moral judgments" I'm left wondering what standard you have to say that morals *advance*? You may be able to say that our moral judgments change over time, but I don't see how you can say that moral judgments *advance* (improve) until you first demonstrate that you have an objective moral source. Only with an objective, unchanging moral source can you say that moral judgments advance as they come closer to approximating this objective, unchanging standard.
). So, for instance, we have atheist Massimo Pigliucci writing criticisms of new atheists like Jerry Coyne. And, in turn, we have new atheists like PZ Myers lashing back at these (old school?) atheists with comments like "well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all" (Confrontation All the Way, Pharyngula).
