What are ethics? Ethics are a subset of heuristics for desision making. The subset consists of decisions that affect other sentient beings. Many decisions don't (should I drink water now or later) but some do (should I steal this motorbike).
The moon has no ethics. Algae probably has no ethics. Mice have limited ethics, generally related to how their decisions affect fellow mice.
Ethics are mostly hardwired into you when your brain developed, and they were determined genetically. If we didn't have this hardwiring, the cost of thinking through a decision would be overwhelming (the game theory is incredibly deep) putting you at a huge survival disadvantage. But ethics can be learned from society (necessary adaptation!) and also consciously chosen. Although I'd argue that we have far less ability to consciously choose our ethics than we think we do.
Because ethics come in part from society, children have big wide openings in their underdeveloped ethical systems. Children will often believe that stealing, murdering, cheating, etc, might be the smartest move. It takes parents and/or life experience to discover this is almost always incorrect. Some adults have "arrested development" and continue to operate with under-developed ethics. These people tend to be in and out of the prison system. We could argue about whether this is genetic or developmental or environmental or societal, but that would make this post far too long and more controversial than I was intending it to be.
The ethics that a Christian has and the ethics that an athiest has are different:
1. Athiests don't believe there is any ethics to praying, going to church, or paying tithe to the local minister, keeping the sabbath, not eating pork, or any other god-given rules from a god they don't believe exists, wherein the rule is esoteric and doesn't affect their fellow sentient beings.
2. Athiests feel it is unethical to disrespect the non-standard sexuality of a person, whether homosexual or transgender, whereas Christians appear to believe it is unethical to have non-standard sexuality in the first place.
3. When it comes to treating others with the "golden rule", the ethical systems are virtually identical, except:
4. Religious people have some carve outs for stealing and murdering (as evidenced by Israel).
If I have a choice of dealing with an atheist or a theist, I feel safer dealing with the atheist.
I've heard some Christians who believe the world would be much worse if it were not for Christians. That without Christianity, people would partake in all kinds of activities they feel are unethical: stealing, cheating, murdering, etc. But if it is only your religion that prevents you from doing those things, that frightens me. I would *hope* you were born with (and developed) ethics that prevent you from doing those things just because they feel very wrong. So for people who think they would benefit from harming others, please keep going to church!
I don't know any Palestinians. I don't think I even know any Arabs. And yet I feel great empathy towards Palestinian women and children and doctors and aid workers when they die. If atheist's ethics were only selfish, I wouldn't feel like this.
