In reply to this comment by krelokk:
Athiests aren't people that "can't believe in right and wrong" That also makes it sound like athiests and agnostics don't believe an form of morality.

The average athiest would say religion is very "wrong". Through education and an open mind, they are usually pretty sure they are "right" about this.


Well, I think it is appropriate to get into the different types of atheists in this kind of debate. There 4 general classifications of an atheist. The Implicit vs. explicit and Strong vs. weak.

Implicit atheism is the absence of the believe in theism without ever rejecting it. For instance, someone not exposed to the idea that there could be a God watching over them. Like a new born, or some one born in a culture without such notions. Then there is the explicit atheist which is the outcome of being exposed to the idea and then rejecting it.

Then, in that explicit atheist category, there is the weak and the strong atheist. The strong atheist accepts that the there is no God, or God does not exist as a true statement. The weak atheist also usually called an agnostic, would believe that you can not say one way or the other. There isn't enough known about either side to make a distinction. So they don't count out the existence might be true, but they also can not claim that it isn't true. The weak atheist decides not to decide. Some people further the distinction for weak atheism to hold that it can never be shown that god can exist. Though this is debated, it does provide some level of distinction between the weak atheist and an agnostic. These are human classifications after all, so it isn't exactly clear on the distinctions, but that is a pretty good run down of the state of the words in use.

Back on topic though. Some categories of these atheists find themselves in a pickle when you talk about absolute morality. Some would assert that more than just a believe in god, atheism rejects all forms of believe without evidence. Atheism is more than just non-theism, its against faith at large. This is a newer use of the idea of atheism and still isn't accepted into the commonly held connotation of atheism, but is gaining some popularity amongst certain atheist thinkers. There is no clear new word for this grouping, so I will call it super atheist for now.

For the super atheist, morality is a hard subject. If you can't use any faith based items for making your morality, you have to either choose a morality that is subjective and relates only to you, or you have to show that there is some universally true morality that is applicable to everyone. This is were we may difer in our use of the word “believe”.

What I refer to believe, I am referring to the idea that you are holding to something even though you have no rational grounds to stand on. For instance. It is a western believe, Christian or not, that to beat a women is wrong. This is because women, statistically speaking, are not as strong as men (I know women who can take me, but statistically women have ¼ less muscle mass than a man). And in this, we believe that it is wrong for a man to take advantage of that difference.

However, in some tribal and Asian cultures, this line of reasoning isn't followed, in fact, it is just the opposite. A womens weakness is seen as inviting things to dominate her. A man can abuse his wife simply because he is stronger. It is seen as the way it was intended. There is no real way to show one way is right or wrong using reason alone, you have to interject your own personal beliefs which do not really come from anyplace objective.

So in other words, to this date, there is no such thing as universal morality. It is completely subjective. It is based on things that one believes in themselves and not of some flawless chain of reasoning. Who is to say when something is reasonable enough to be the given morality? There is no such standard. So once again, we are dealing with believe which is just as invalid to the super atheist and faith. I hope I didn't make this response to convoluted I have a habit of doing that.

So in short, I think the position of the super atheist is unobtainable when combined with the desire to make a claim about morality. The other positions of atheism do not make a claim about believe in general, just about god, so they are not presented with the same problem in morality. However, I will say this, I do think agnosticism is the only true, non-faith based position. To believe in God takes just as much faith as to not believe in him, there isn't actually a way to prove one way or the other. The only real tool people in the modern world use to talk about the existence of God is when talking with science. But science is limited to this universe. Science does not take in to account things that could happen outside of this universe, in fact they would say nothing exists outside of the universe, which isn't known, we just have to take that on faith...which is where this all started in the first place hehehe.