CAP: 10. There are no fundamental morals

One of the core assumptions which both underlies my atheism and is a direct result of it is that there are no universal fundamental morals which pre-exist and are independent of human judgment. Morals are socially constructed by people not handed down from on high.

This leaves us all in the moral wilderness with no guidance, exactly where we should be. We can fall back on the traditional morals which have guided us for so long and served us relatively well... however in doing this we must recognize we are doing so by choice. There are many “traditional” moral codes and in following any given one of them you are choosing not to follow all of the others. You have to answer the question, if only to yourself, of why you have chosen any one over any other, just as you would in choosing a “non-traditional” moral code. In this regard the argument that “it is the morality of my fathers” is insufficient. We must choose our moral course consciously and rationally, and ultimately we will need to follow our deviate from our supposed moral course consciously and rationally.

In every situation we choose the moral code we wish to guide us because we believe it will bring us the results we desire, and we choose how closely we will follow it in every situation based on our desires, nothing more, nothing less. We may say we do X because it is proscribed by our moral code, but we can just as easily choose not to do X, and we can just as easily choose another moral code which would not tell us to do X and then we would still have to choose when faced with the choice whether or not to do X... There are no answers, there are no rules, we are Free, terribly and frighteningly Free.

Part of the social construction of morality is the social establishment of reward and punishment for “moral” and “immoral” actions. These rewards and punishments are a replacement and reflection of the false promises made by religion of reward and punishment in an afterlife. This is the source of law, but even this structure does not save us from the terror of choice because we always have to answer the question of whether our fear of being caught and punished is sufficient to cause us to conform. We also have the social responsibility to make the laws which will govern us. In the modern age of democracy we are no longer offered the false option of abdication of responsibility, false because even such abdication to higher authority was itself choosing, as it is to choose not to participate in the processes of self-governing.