Sounds like everyone is making excuses. It sounds like everyone is proving the point that atheists have less morals behavior than religious people. I am not missing the point. I am well aware of what atheism is and isn't. I guess I am learning what atheists are to my dismay. It seems to me to be pointless to cry about what religion does to atheists when atheists aren't willing to go to the next step and become something more than a bunch of whiny individuals who can't get together to fight for their own rights. Prove me wrong, prove the religious people wrong or look at yourself for the source of your problems with religion since it is you who have the problem, not me. I get the feeling there is a kind of sour grapes attitude about morality with many atheists. Religious fundies says morality is out of their reach of atheists so atheists assume it is something they don't want or need. Give me something more than excuses for not being better people.
It
sounds to me, to make comparable use of weasel words, like you're wilfully misinterpreting what has been said up to this point to support your own predetermined conclusion. You're not "learning" a damn thing about atheists; it
sounds like you made up your mind some time ago, and are zeroing in only on those statements which you can twist to confirm your belief.
It's a ludicrous mischaracterisation to claim that atheists aren't interested in having a code of personal conduct, be it called "morals," "ethics" or what have you. What is correct, however, is to say that atheists aren't interested in any element of such a code the inclusion of which can only be justified with an appeal to some deity. Thus, to give an example, while an atheist is likely to agree with the commandments "thou shalt not steal" and "thou shalt not kill" (even though he will have accepted them for different reasons than "because God says so"), he is unlikely to accept the commandments to not use the Lord's name in vain and keep holy the Sabbath. I think atheists are also disinclined to consider all but a few, if any, moral strictures to be "absolute," since that particular status also tends to rely, albeit not always explicitly, on appeal to divine authority. That's not to say all atheists are therefore relativists, if only because the "absolutist/relativist" dichotomy is utterly bogus to begin with; there's also such a thing as a universalist, a term which probably comes closest to describing my own position in this regard.
However, because of this absence of belief in anything which would provide the basis for an "absolute" element in morality, atheists do, in my experience, tend to formulate codes of conduct which they are reluctant to impose upon others, at least in their entirety. Thus, to an atheist, morality (or ethics, or whatever you want to call it) is not only a
code of personal conduct, it is also to a large extent a
personal code of conduct. For example, I find the practice of prostitution rather sordid and distasteful, and it's against my personal principles to avail myself of it, but I don't think my personal preferences should be imposed upon anyone who does, provided the business takes place with the informed consent of all parties involved (i.e. the prostitute isn't being exploited, the customer isn't going behind his partner's back, etc.).
Arguably, this may also illustrate the disconnect between religious (in this case, monotheistic) and atheistic notions of morality. Presumably, many a monotheist would describe me as immoral because I do not condemn prostitution outright. However, this does not alter the fact that I, personally, have never availed myself of the services of a prostitute (or worked as one), and I can't help feel that in said monotheists' book, that should make me a more moral person than Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, self-professed Christians though they might have been. I have hard time believing that willingness to judge others is a necessary part of being a moral person, especially not when it comes to Christians (Matthew 7:3-5 and all that).
I'm also inclined to note that, in my opinion, the number of strictures one professes to observe are not an adequate measure of how moral a person one is. Rather, I would say the question is how true one actually is to those strictures. The prostitution example above points to mine, and the basis is the old standby
"Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you." Nobody wants to be deprived of life, liberty, material goods they have earned or other means to pursue happiness, be it by force or by deceit, and I most certainly think less (to put to mildly) of those who inflict such things upon others. As an adjunct, I can also not abide hypocrites or other forms of intellectual laziness.
This is why I bridle at the assertion oft made by certain monotheists that atheists are inacapable of morality: the actual complaint is that atheists won't accept that prostitution, buttsex, same-sex marriage or whatever should be illegal just "because God says so," but the implication made is that atheists have no compunction about driving under the influence of every drug in existence, inciting nice Christian kids to have premarital sex and then aborting the foetus when the girl gets pregnant and, of course, torturing puppies and strangling kittens. It's a lie, and I see no reason why it should merit anything other than a hearty "up yours." Speaking of which...
Give me something more than excuses for not being better people.
Excuse me, but where the hell do you get off assuming that any atheist, merely by dint of being an atheist, is a less than adequately decent person? I've spent much of my adult life trying to contribute to making the world a better place, and however small, I'm convinced I helped make a difference. So as far as I'm concerned, you can take your smug, superior attitude and shove it.
