It’s called common sense which the religious don’t seem to have.

I am always suspicious of people that can't tell right from wrong unless it is written down. What kind of sick mind can't tell murder is wrong if it is written down. Stealing? Where does it say that is wrong? Oh, ok.

I don't need a book of myths to tell me right from wrong. It;s wrong to kill, abuse, cheat, basically harm another person. Religion takes things to an extreme. They judge people on whom they choose to have sex with and for not following their religious beliefs. But religion breaks it's own rules everyday. Just like the mega churches collecting money for their 'church' while living in mansions their flock is paying for, religion is the root of evil. Not atheists.

Transgenders ? Your son or daughter wishes to switch genders .

What does this have to do with morals?

Would u allow this ?

And I'm supposed to do what...... kick them out....... tell them they'll get no dessert until they stay the way they are? Too many kids commit suicide because their parents reject them when they tell them they are transgender. I'll be damned if I contribute to that number.

As a parent, you accept your child AS THEY ARE. That includes if they decide the gender they were born into isn't the gender they believe they are. This has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with being a compassionate human being.

If it doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s not “wrong.” Sometimes it’s inappropriate and we abstain from things because they merely make others uncomfortable (like walking around naked in public).

Lawful and moral are only loosely connected. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s moral, and vice versa.

A great book examines this question, “The Righteous Mind” explores how morality evolved. One example was, adult brother and sister secretly have sex, use 2 forms of birth control (to prevent pregnancy leading to genetic anomaly) and never tell anyone. Is it wrong? It’s yucky, but they have eliminated any potential for harm to others. Lots of people say that it’s wrong even if they can’t articulate why, except “it’s gross.” Disgust is a powerful force in what we believe is “wrong.” Also sense of fairness, care for others, loyalty, and a couple of others. All of these have an evolutionary basis.

i don't engage with any depth or seriousness with people who ask me how, as an atheist (not athiest) i would tell right from wrong, as those people are sufficiently ignorant (seriously, without a work of fiction from a couple/few thousand years ago (depending on what you mean when you say "bible" ) a person can't tell right from wrong? and seriously, someone who relies upon said book is such a superior person to someone who doesn't (that's the arrogance)? and no, we don't make up what's right or wrong. there is a special advantage in cooperating with others and not murdering and consuming one another. check prison population. there aren't many atheists there, and that's not because we're so damned smart we don't get caught.

g

The bedrock principle is does this harm other people? I'm talking about real harm, not offending someone's lack of humor or sense of distressed privilege.

I have been an atheist since age 13, when I realized the Bible is just a book of stories written by men.

"How can you be an atheist and be a good person with morals?" judgmental Christians ask.

Treating people with kindness and doing the right thing is a series of daily decisions. I don't need a Bible or preacher to tell me to be a good person.

I got a Master of Public Administration degree because I get the greatest reward from doing work that helps other people.

Nothing is wrong with any of the examples you gave obviously and it's sort of odd that they would even come up as questions in your mind, but no shame in seeking outside opinion. Just because something is unlawful doesnt make it immoral. First lets define a few things.

Law is the ordinance of your area where politicians have determined what we as a society will put up with. Break all the laws you can get away with as long as you can do so without victimizing any individual. I see nothing wrong with it. Fuck the government, they have no qualms about breaking laws and victimizing whole nations of us at once. Theres a different set of laws enforced based on whether you're rich or poor, black or white. Most laws started with good intentions but the law is now thoroughly corrupt. It's not my barometer for morality by a long shot.

Ethics are your professional code of conduct often dictated by your career or institutions and organizations you belong to. It's unethical for a doctor to do any harm to a person's body, for a professor to date a student, unethical for a repair person to lie to you about what a spare part costs, unethical for a journalist to give up his sources or a law student to give legal advice before passing the bar. You should always follow your professional ethics unless an exception is clearly necessary to save a life or something but that'll rarely if ever come up.

Morality is the root of ethics and laws though, and the only thing that matters ultimately. You get your morality from your religion or culture. A lot of moralizing rules like those against sex and nudity are bullshit obviously. The only universal basis for morality necessary and agreed on by almost every religion, philosophy and culture is the golden rule. If it doesn't break the golden rule and you can get away with it, knock yourself out for all I care.

It's illegal for me to smoke weed but it provides medicinal benefits that I couldn't afford otherwise and my quality of life without it is hardly worth living. I'm not stealing or hurting anyone to obtain it so: ethically and in the eyes of my local laws, this is wrong, but morally based on my own conscience it is not. Even cops have told me they aren't worried about it so much these days either; their sense of personal morality is superceding their professional ethics and law. Law means very little in determining how wrong something is. Professional ethics and personal morality mean everything.

Obviously you can see by the tax and EPA loopholes corporations exploit, that just because something is legal doesnt make it moral. The only clearcut cases of wrongdoing I believe everyone has to agree on are murder, assault, theft, destruction of property, harassment, things where your selfish actions impede the freedom or autonomy of someone else, where there is a clear cut victim. Otherwise the only person you could possibly be hurting is yourself and thats up to you to decide what is personally wrong for yourself. No one else gives a shit.

So in summation
1 does it break the golden rule? Don't do it
2 if someone tells you you're hurting them even though you don't see how, believe em and don't do it
3 pay attention and be realistic about the kind of damage you do to yourself, and do as little of that as possible too. Or don't, your funeral.

It's really not that complicated to tell if something is wrong, right? Surely you can use the golden rule n leave it at that.

I don’t know man. You are kind of all over the place.
Your topic spans legality, morality, and ethics.

I disagree that Atheists make up their own rules. That sort of implies that rules are purely based off religious beliefs.

Also what does any of this have to do with gender roles? Gender does not imply morality or ethics. To imply this is in poor taste.

Also “freedom within our laws”
Laws are laws. Not much freedom in that at all. Follow the law or be punished.

So
Follow the law
Create your own morality
Create your own ethics

Throughout most of the history of mankind, a person was told that his life belonged to some type of group: the tribe, the king, or the god. With the arrival of enlightenment ideas, people realized that their life belongs to themselves. People began to see themselves as individuals, not just members of groups. These enlightenment ideas resulted in some of the greatest achievements of mankind: reason, the scientific revolution, valuing education, and the idea of individual rights. The result was a lifting of a cloud of darkness over mankind, and the beginning of human flourishing, which is only now reaching most of the world. But, the one idea that wasn't changed much in the enlightenment was morality. Even today, most moral systems are based upon a god, the tribe, the nation, a race, or some other group. We are told that what is moral should be based upon what is good for the group. Why not base our morality on individualism? What is good is what is good for ourselves, as long as we don't harm others.

"Is walking around public naked wrong?"

• Only so far as it distresses people. Nudist colonies, where everybody agrees to be naked, does not have this problem.

"What causes something to be conciseres wrong ?"

• Since atheism is not a moral perspective, my sense of right and wrong are aligned with (what I understand to be) the humanist morality.
  A particular action is right if it promotes happiness and wellbeing. A particular action is wrong if it detracts from happiness and wellbeing.
  In short; harm no one (with the exception of self-defense). If it harms no one, it is not wrong.

"Let’s say a adult wants to engage in a orgy"

• If it harms no one, there is no wrong in this in my view.

"Basically as u can see u can kinda make up as athiest what’s wrong or right "

• 1. "Atheism" is not supposed to tell us what is right or wrong; no more than being blond should. That's a separate issue.

2. As opposed to who? Religious people?
   There are roughly two archetypes in Christian myths, one of evil and one of mercy. Now anyone can pick and chose whichever passage in whichever part of the scripture as the moral truth.

• A secular humanist is bound by the principle of prohibiting harm. You can't advocate for harming people (unless doing nothing is worse - caving to the Nazi army would have resulted in more harm than fighting them) and still be a humanist. But as a religious person you can do anything; you just have to find the corresponding passage.

"Which is great imo but how do we determine this ?"

• Same way apes have passed laws about morals since we developed the ability to speak. Discussion.
  Make a case for why something should be legal. If you can convince the majority we should go back to child sacrifice, the laws may well change. But there is a reason those rituals are unpopular today.

The concepts of Right and Wrong that you describe are social constructs. That is why they change with location and time. These rules are passed down from adults to children and by others that we interact with in sociaty.

There are another type of laws which are called natural laws. These laws are derived from evolutions interplay with nature. They are strategies for survival of the species. For example, different flight or fight strategies (a complex set of rules to achieve a desired outcome) are adopted by different animals. A lion's strategy may always stand and fight where as a rabbit may always run. So, do too humans adopt survival strategies. After strategies are proven successful, they become natural laws.

Ive have NEVER heard that Atheists are against gender reassignment in general. There may be some Atheists that are "against it" but it's not a defining attribute of Atheists. Please check your sources on this.

When you say that atheists just make up the rules as they go along implies that atheists lack an ultimate set of defining laws. Presumably, you meant in comparison to religious people. This is a old argument made by ardent religious believers. To me, this is very offensive because it implies that lack of morality and therefore not knowing right from wrong.

A lot of people say being naked isn't wrong and they are right. Now is exposing oneself to a child wrong? Most would say yes. Being naked in public creates a higher chance of doing so. Which is why things thst arent "wrong" are illegal

The reading, writing and talk of fellow humans and the observations based on it are a big part. I have never been able to understand the killing and stealing based on those things.

Try to be good to people. That's pretty much it.

sighs

I determine morality just like I did when I was religious...... If it's wrong for me it's wrong.

As for why it's wrong, who cares. IT'S WRONG FOR ME and that's all that I care about.

As an almost life-long Atheist my answer would have to be simply, Let your own conscience be your guide because IF you need a tome filled with arcane, archaic, Bronze Age Fire-side Mythologies and Fairy-tales to YOU what is right and what is wrong, then in my opinion you are sorely lacking as a human being.

That which harms people or makes their lives worse is undesirable, morally. Sometimes, however, a situation occurs where harming people or making their lives worse is a consequence of doing something that makes other people's lives better - take the example of shooting a moron who's running around a school killing children, bad for him but the 'positive' of stopping more children dying outweighs the harm done to the shooter.

In those situations where there is no 'balancing act of harm done' then I see the situation as remarkably clear. This is why I oppose the death penalty as a concept - the criminal dies, but who are saved from harm or having their lives enhanced? No-one, except those who enjoy the grim satisfaction of saying, "He deserved to die! Kill him!" - and that is, lets face it, a limited form of satisfaction, born of desire for vengeance rather than justice.

Similarly, we come to homophobia. Making your homosexual next-door neighbour's life a misery does what? Damn all. What he/she does in the privacy of the bedroom has no effect on you - so the homophobia is pure harm without any offset.

It's where there IS a trade off that things get complex - and here other thoughts creep in.

Is the harm you're considering causing just? A man may be white, a man may be black, a man may be asian - none of that is his 'fault', nor should he suffer for it, even if it would enhance the lives of others if he did. Being black does not justify people making you a slave - even if the profits of your slavery will buy your owner's children new teddy bears and make them really happy.

Is the harm you're considering based on a concept of selfishness? Yes - stealing a wad of a wealthy person's cash could greatly enhance your life, but doing so is more a matter of selfishness than morality.

I could go on - but in all honesty it's summed up by two things:-

THINK, and DON'T BE A CUNT.

[agnostic.com]
"agnostic.com/humanism/on_morality"

There is really no absolute right or wrong.
One can say that if you love society (or the perks it generates to you as the possibility to have a family, private property, technology etc), so right is to act in a way to stabilize the model of society that you like.
But if you like chaos... Go for it.

Culture.
Society is held together by loose moral contracts with others when these contracts get broken if the deal breaker isn't dealt with to societies satisfaction then the threads of society become unraveled.

Think of it in smaller settings then work your way out. Would it be ok for me to hang out in your living room naked? What if there were others present? What if children were also naked? What if people coming of age were naked?What about your grandmother?
You would have to say every one of those is acceptable as would everyone else in order for a given society to deem nudity ok.

Personally I don't care about nudity.