Secular Standards
Secular and Atheists' Moral Principles

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

SML183  

These are the guidelines that promote the secular welfare of humanity.

Accordingly, absolutism, waste, intolerance and purposeful ignorance can be observed to be forms of deceit against oneself, and against those upon whom such stratagems are worked. Deceit works against the fostering of a natural, nurturant society by promoting misguided ignorance and preventing the assimilation of true knowledge about Nature. Deceit in all its forms is a sin against humanity and must be regarded as evil in the ancient sense of that word.

All that exists results from ongoing events and processes. All processes result from myriad combined ongoing events at our level of sensibility, some of those events themselves being the result of lower level processes in a hierarchy of continua. The hierarchy of such ongoing events and processes reaches down to the level of the smallest strings which make up the particles and waveforms of existence, and continues upward to include the universe.

We operate in the middle of all that continua at what is called the macro level, and are outfitted by Nature in ways that best fit our needs for support and survival. Humankind has developed science to acknowledge that, and to increase our skills at using it to benefit ourselves in our natural world. By constant testing according to our natural senses, and in accordance with the special instruments humankind has developed to enhance those senses, we have increased our understanding of Nature and enabled a heretofore uncommon standard of existence for those living where that science has been enabled to thrive, inasmuch as and for however long it has been so enabled.

Where the skills enabled by science have been forbidden in our world, humankind still subsists in misery and dirty despair. As atheists, we see all religious bodies at work to fulminate against our better interests, and that others' goddism prevents us from exercising our natural rights. We are not in this world to be approved by anybody's imaginary god. We are in this world to be approved of by ourselves, and we see all religious bodies at work to prevent that, the same as they are against our right to free thought and free expression.

We see them as perpetrators of the secular sins listed above, and those that have not yet been expressed as such. When we have learned to see all that exists as involved in various ways within the overall process of natural evolution (which understanding is inherent to the view of all existence being events and processes), we also attain to many unheralded insights about the nature of those events, and also of some processes that go on unrecognized as such, within their rightful place in the overall scheme of things. We learn from that to recognize good and evil as processes within reality. No one will ever recognize that without this way of understanding. Inherent to that is the way to perceive how the self-proclaimed harbingers of "good" act in ways inherent to evil, and how to recognize their harmful acts as such.

What is "evil" if there be no gods? Evil is the process inherent to performance of the secular sins, and the events incorporated within that kind of process. It is as simple as that, and any person can learn to recognize that for themselves.

1. How about murder? Isn't killing someone a secular sin? It's not mentioned in the list.

   a. As mentioned, the list is incomplete. Since, as atheists, we recognize no gods and deem human beings to be responsible for our own consequences, morality must be a strictly human concern, and actions against humanity are the sins. Look at it this way: Murder is an irreversible waste of human life. Murder is an act against humanity. Murder is something one can know to be wrong by considering the effects of having it done to himself.

2. What about punishment? Isn't that also an act against humanity?

   a. Here is where science must play a role in this, to investigate and establish the consequences of all our various actions. Where punishment succeeds in a worthy stated purpose, or if some other method of correction proves more successful, can only be established by careful and honest applications of science to design tests, record data, and study the results. Otherwise, the pleasure and pain principle teaches us how we are subject to rules regarding action and consequence; whatever our beliefs may be, those rules are incorporated into them.

3. You write a lot about morality, and yet show little of hard factual material to back up what you say and don't show how a secular morality would be applied. Why is that?

   a. The answer to that is found secreted in Comment number 2. The aims of a secular morality are inherent to its nature, wherein we turn to the material world to determine how to make things work. We humans dwell in the realm of reality that world occupies, and have our own concerns to deal with. The issue has been confused in the past because we all have different needs, education, experience and desires, and so we let that distract us in our reasoning. Truth be told, there exists only one version of Nature, and we share in common the animal senses within that. Hard, factual material can only be gleaned from the diligent application of honest, proper science. That has always been prevented in this area of human interest since the beginning of recorded history. Time has arrived for that to change, if humanity finds our survival as a species to be important enough to warrant our concern.

4. That sounds like the kind of mystery-laden threat religions make when they are trying to lay something heavy onto us. What, exactly, does that mean?

   a. It's about nothing mysterious at all, threat or not. It's common knowledge that the bumbling, greed and creed-infested governments of our world have found it impossible to prevent powerful weapons and related materials from falling into the hands of people with ill intent. It's common knowledge that a wrong move by any one of several different parties could initiate a mistaken reprisal against an action misunderstood to have been taken, and set off a nuclear holocaust, and that we already have enough of those bombs to wipe out life on Earth several times over.
   
   That is not all there is to it, however: It is also common knowledge (among those who dare to acknowledge such knowledge without pangs of guilt) that Earth has been struck by catastrophic calamities issued onto us from space. The era of the dinosaurs ended by such an event, for example, and the Earth's face is pockmarked by the evidence of many other such strikes. If science is promoted by humanity so that it can discover how to ward off the next such event, and discover as well how to predict it with increased accuracy, we may well have heirs walking the face of this world for thousands of years into the future. But, science has not been promoted. It has been, instead, politicized to a state of near ineffectuality in some fields, and its results edited in others to a point of meaninglessness. I wrote about one such prediction of a future strike in The Complete Universe of Memes. There are others, closer in time to us than the one the book talks about.

5. I thought atheists do not believe in such things as sin and evil. How can you use such terminology while still denying the existence of God?

   a. Atheists do not believe in evil or sin, and such, as things in themselves capable to roam freely about in our midst. Most of us seem to accept (not believe in) them as conditions inherent to events involving human beings' actions against each other. Regarding that, natural catastrophes may seem evil, but that idea has to be discounted due to lack of intent on the part of Nature, just as accidents among humans are most often discounted (except due to negligence) in societies where secular justice prevails (the pagan justice systems inherent to Great Britain and the United States have been heavily contaminated by Arabic religious influences and so can no longer be used as standards of comparison for the rest of the world).

   b. Wise atheists do not deny the existence of gods. Wise atheists are aware of many Principles of Atheology and consider all things accordingly; even wise atheists unaware of said principles are aware of correct analytical and critical thinking and the avoidance of the fallacious. We have no need to prove what we do not deny nor accept, but instead question and, while we await your answers, live according to our well-founded expectations that you will never provide any except for the sub-standard pabulum upon which the religious feed. I cannot speak for all atheists, but I can make free use of and adopt for myself the best and most practical and practicable of all the ideas other atheists have tossed at me, and build my own philosophy with those with the greatest verisimilitude. The one great benefit of secular thought is that it is always testable.

6. What makes you believe all atheists agree with you?

   a. I don't, because they don't. And, most secular people who don't consider themselves to be atheists agree even less. We just don't get up the urge to kill each other over our differences. Make some noise, yes; kill, no. We'll leave that kind of emotionalism to you guys.

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —