daystar wrote:
Most of the secular humanist values are the same as Christian values. Generally SHs hold to a Golden Rule sort of system of values. Why? Specifically. Is there some universal scientific laws that tell you to still keep those values, that they're "good"?If you can't answer the "why", haven't you just kept the exact same value system and merely done away with the dogmatic, religious part? Could not there also, still, be a problem with the system of values? Should we not also discover our highest values and put them to test as well?
For the most part, most people in the Western world hold pretty close value systems; based on the notions of individual liberties and of being a positive and constructive member of society. Other cultures may have slightly different stresses. For instance, in the Orient, society tends to be more important than the individuals.
The reason for that bit of a digression is to show that morality is a product of culture. All social animals; chimps, dogs, whales, humans, etc., require rules of conduct. That's the very definition of social. Those rules permit individuals to fit within a hieararchy that allow the society to function. In return the society offers the individual protection and support.
It shouldn't surprise you that an atheist would share many morals with a theist. In fact, I doubt you'll find very many atheists that don't, because atheists, like theists, are products of their culture. However, the key difference for those of a rationalist humanist bent is that they do not view these codes as divinely inspired. This means that there is an acceptance that morals are indeed relative, and that is bourne out by comparing different societies, and even the same society through different periods of its history.
Morals change over time. They don't change willy-nilly, but rather as a society evolves. Morals are not concrete absolutes handed down by some Big Guy in the Sky, they are part of a larger apparatus of society; involving economics, religion, politics and philosophy. Thus we see the rise of humanism during the Enlightenment, which was largely in response to the horrific religious wars that had so damaged European society, and left it fractured and bereft of the security of the Medieval church. Humanist philosophers began to envision moral systems that were based upon reason, so that a man of any faith could function and even prosper in a society based up rationally-derived ideas of right and wrong. In other words, one could not simply justify any alleged moral position with the phrase "God says so", because, whether there was a God as Christians or anyone else envisioned, it was simply too easy to abuse that justification, and too difficult to demonstrate it to be false.
My morals are subtly different than they were in my JW days. While the biggies like not stealing, not bearing false witness, not committing adultery and the like are certainly present, I do not accept, for instance, that homosexuality is bad, or that one need hold any particular orthodox religious belief (whether within the context of one's faith group or within the larger society). I believe humans have a built-in need to fit within the society they are born into, and that means accepting, by and large, the rules of that society. They may attempt to justify their recognition and obedience to those rules by referencing some supernatural origins, but ultimately, our morality is the product of many aspects of our history, and that what we find right and wrong today may seem quite parochial and even delerious, just as we view slavery and burning of heretics to be immoral today.