[lovecg]

> In fact, the source of morals among atheists seems to be a permanent puzzle for many people with religious background, simply claiming them as religion-based misses the point completely.

I don’t have a religious background and it’s still a puzzle for me. Best I can manage to explain it is through a combination of tradition and genes (“human nature”), and tradition is often indeed derived from historical religious environment. Moral is mostly universal but not completely - for one example the attitudes towards hard work at the expense of everything else vary greatly across different cultures and religious traditions.

[atq2119]

Amusingly, there's the same trap here as with the "who created the world" problem.

Sure, religious people get their morals largely from their religion. But where do the morals of the religion come from?

[lovecg]

You’re right of course - religion and tradition feed on each other. I’m imagining it as a dynamic system with feedback loops, etc. where organized religion plays the role of the mechanism that slows down change and provides stasis. We’re only a couple generations into our “post-religious” society so the jury is still out on how this great decoupling will play out exactly.

[nautilius]

I don't think moral is universal at all - 'You shall not kill' vs cannibal societies and honor killings, monogamy vs polygamy, eating animals vs vegetarianism, slavery vs abolitionism, democracy vs. tribalism, patriarchy vs. equality, mothers' rights vs unborn rights, etc.

It's not only not universal, but it's highly fluid (which it couldn't be if it was universal).

[v-erne]

I always preferred to look at morals as survival strategies for societies. From this point of view they do not have to be universal to work - its enough that they skew the probablity a bit towards survival of given group and the rest is just some version of Darwins Game of Life.

[nautilius]

Obviously they don't have to be universal to work, that's my whole post - they aren't, and humanity was pretty successful in settling every last piece of this planet.