Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Just FTR, the people who say ['But how can you have a moral compass without God'] don't 'have' moral compasses -- they're outsourcing them entirely to another entity, in theory, God, but in practice, the preacher or the local groupthink 'priesthood of all believers' collective. I don't see how you can claim to have any moral compass at all when you basically elect to never think about morality and rather let someone else do all the thinking for you." -- Chris at Sadly, No!, 2012-06-16 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting this earlier]

[I'm familiar with the "How can atheists have morals?" line, but I've always been puzzled by it. While my religion does inform my morals and my values, by the time I first heard the "atheist=>amoral" business I had already figured out how to get to more or less the same morals (the important bits anyhow) from at least three other starting places, two of them not needing any belief in a deity. (Having already been exposed to very moral atheists, agnostics, apathists, Pagans, etc. by then may have helped, but my first understanding of it came from reading about Existentialism in school and figuring out how to reconstruct the core of my own morality using Existentialist arguments.) This quotation flips the question around in a way that I find interesting and useful. I suppose to some extent my morality also informs my faith, not just the other way around, as I hinted at in a comment a month ago that referred to a future essay I need to get around to writing.]