Atheists: What authority governs your morals? ( if any )?

Question

What authority tells you the difference between right and wrong?

And if there is no authority over your morals, can you still have morals?

Answer 1

If you need a god to tell you what's right and wrong, I feel very sad for you.

Any person with a shred of common sense and decency knows what's right and wrong

Answer 2

I decide my own morals, just like everyone else. Unlike some people, I choose not to defer that choice to a rigid, archaic, barbaric philosophy.
And of course morals exist without an authority to govern them. In fact that's pretty much the only condition in which morality really exists. If you're only good because someone tells you to be, why do you need morality?

Answer 3

My morality is not based on authority, but on love and compassion for my fellow man. I don't need a king, a parent, or a God to tell me what is right and wrong.

Authoritarian morality is, if anything, a hollow morality. If you base your system of ethics on nothing more than what a certain person (be it a God or a man) says, then you're nothing but a mindless drone--you are trying to absolve yourself of moral responsibility, really, by putting all your decisions in the hands of a higher power. The first problem with this is that even if someone is more powerful than you, that doesn't make him more ethically justified: might (even divine might!) does not make right. The second problem is that you can't necessarily know what a higher power wants with certainty, even if one does exist. So you're flying blind in that you can't be certain that your religion is the only true one, and you're flying towards a meaningless target in that even if your God really exists, that doesn't make his commands inherently good. If God told you to commit genocide, you'd be doing evil no matter what. An act's good or evil is based on whether it harms or helps people, not based on whether some arbitrary authority says "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shall" or what-have-you.

This is also, incidentally, why atheists (and secular ethicists in general) are less prone to war than theists (and religious, authoritarian ethicists in general): when two secularists meet, they can resolve their differences through discussion, because their views are based on their shared humanity (i.e., their love for their fellow man) and on reason (i.e., logic, experience, etc.). In contrast, when two dogmatists meet, they cannot ever resolve their differences because they each base their views and actions entirely on an authority's dictates: if the two authorities conflict, then violence and/or isolationism is almost inevitable. There can be no dialogue.

Answer 4

No offense, but I hate this question.

What governs my morals is human intelligence, common sense, and empathy for my fellow human beings.

Come on now, don't you think that if there WAS a God, He'd be sad to see that you don't have enough confidence in the brain he gave you, the common sense He instilled in you, and the ability to empathize He "blessed" you with, to know these things ALL ON YOUR OWN, without a book or preacher telling you what to do? Give yourself a little more credit.

And anyone who says they would be out there killing, stealing, and raping if it weren't for God is a scary, scary person, and they are surely doomed to any Hell that there might be, because they are only behaving themselves due to fear of punishment, and not because they are actually good people.

Answer 5

No way! Some atheists don't rape and murder because deep down they know these so called "morals" are not their own. If I knew that there wasn't a God, which is what you atheists are all about, then I would be out doing whatever I wanted. Killing, stealing, raping, it wouldn't matter right? I mean if there is no God then why not just go all out. See I think you still want to live by God's morals, so when you die and see Him you can say well see I still lived a pretty good life...the problem there is that it doesn't matter because you still don't have a way to cover even the smallest sins you have committed. Man just believe!

Answer 6

I know the difference between right and wrong and I am quit capable of controlling myself without the authority of some fairy tale God to police my morals thank you.

Answer 7

The morals of any intelligent man are simple.
Do that unto others which you would like done to you.
And don't do that unto others which you wouldn't like to be done to you.
Not to say Christians aren't intelligent, I am just saying that all smart people have realized that this is the principle they should live by when interacting with others. Nonetheless, we are all human and we all make mistakes and we don't always follow these morals but nobody is perfect.

Answer 8

Morals, curiously enough long predate Christianity. They evolved (Oh, no! Not evolved!) first from some genetic predisposittions toward social behavior, and were then further refined by living in clans, then tribes. After the development of agriculture people lived in large communities which eventually became cities, and the social forces involved in that environment further refined social behavior.

Most "moral" behavior is less the result of religion than it is the result of social forces.

Answer 9

Initially, it was my upbringing. There's no better authority for teaching you rights and wrongs than your parents, teachers, and family.

In later life, now that I'm no longer being brought up, so to speak, I develop my own sense of right and wrong as I go along.

The idea of taking my morals from millennia-old writings has never appealed to me.

Answer 10

Society governs mine and yours.
You may think religion governs your morals but it isn't so. The states with the highest crime rates in the US are the red states, which contain more Christians. Huge parts of Africa are Christian and utterly crime ridden.
There is no correlation between religion and morality (or non-criminality) anywhere.

Answer 11

Society. Consider that god does not exist, and man invented god. That means, the bible with all its morals (and just exactly how valid those morals are is debatable) was written by man. Therefore, mankind creates and enforces their own morals, with no "higher" authority.