Why do atheists follow false beliefs?

No, dude. That is a false statement, at least within this community of scientists, future scientists, and science groupies. We do not say that the theory of religion is false. On the contrary, we say that it is not a scientific theory precisely because it is not falsifiable. It is derived from faith rather than from observations and reasoning, so no observations and reasoning can be used to test it or perform a peer review. As such we find it not to be a very useful theory for understanding the workings of the universe. Each religious community is free to use its own particular faith to develop its own particular theory, and since competing theories cannot be tested or proven false the system has no way for a consensus to be reached, except by cultural or military conquest. The military option is used far too often, and we see a world of religious communities constantly battling one another and catching all the rest of us in the crossfire. The Abrahamic religions in particular have destroyed three entire civilizations of the only six that have been built on this planet in the name of their god: Egypt, Inca and Aztec. For all of the metallurgy, poison gas and nuclear physics that science has allowed to fall into the hands of militarists, it hasn't caused the world one percent of the grief that evangelical monotheistic religion has caused. Speaking for myself, I don't bother saying that religion is "false." I point to the empirical evidence and say that certain religions are downright bad for humanity.

Why do you equate "unnatural" with "false"? To believe that something is wrong is simply to look at the empirical evidence provided by several thousand years of recorded history and, using our reason and our learning, derive the conclusion that that particular thing does not work to the benefit of civilization. There is no faith in the supernatural or other woo-woo involved like there is in religion. It's simply a matter of caring about our fellow man and figuring out empirically what seems to work out the best for them.

Settle down Beavis. You have some terrible misconceptions about atheism, humanism, and several other isms that you rant about in this thread.

Okay, let's start with your terrible misconception about evolutionary biology. "Survival of the fittest" applies to individuals in species that function as individuals. But in social species, "survival of the fittest" applies to the group. Humans are pack-social like most apes, and like the animals we are most comfortable with as companions: dogs. That means we are genetically programmed to care about the welfare of the pack and all its members--not out of some strange altruistic instinct that we feel but don't understand, but also out of purely selfish interest. Members of a pack-social species need a healthy pack to survive. We don't have the ability as individuals to survive, with as high a probability as we do when we work in harmony and cooperation with our pack. This is most obvious with pack hunters like dogs and humans, who can track and bring down more meat working together than we could hunting individually.

In fact, our first epiphany on the way to developing morality was not somehow finding a way to improve our lives by cooperating with the tribe in the next valley. It was by discovering that we could improve our lives by working with dogs--another species with whom we can't even communicate in our conventional manner. Humans and dogs both learned that by trusting each other, not trying to eat each other, and each species using its unique skills, we had more food, comfort and safety than if we had continued to live by our instincts. There are virtually no humans left who did not make that transition, but there are dogs who did not: we call them wolves.

This is not "false belief" as you delight in calling it. This is reasoned and learned behavior which we use to improve the survival of the pack. More in a moment on how we transcended the pack to become tribes and nations, patience please.

This is an absurd statement that fails to account for the instinctive social ordering of certain species, like say for example our own. Packs in which the cruel but strong kill off the diplomats, teachers, healers, shoemakers, tanners, flint knappers, fletchers, and all other members who work only for the common good will find themselves headed for extinction within one generation.

Yes it is, and that's the point. Homo sapiens is unique among all animals. Only we have this massive forebrain with so much cognitive power that we can actually override our instincts with learned and reasoned behavior. (Well obviously the dogs have a bit of this too. Gotta love 'em, they're so much like us.) We do not have to rely on our instincts to guide us. We can observe the universe and change our behavior in ways that we think will make us more successful, note whether it in fact works that way, and keep trying until we get it right. Case in point: we tried monotheistic religion, it was a dismal failure, it's time to move on to something else.

Humanism is a theory that was learned and reasoned by observations of the world and ourselves. It's recursive. We learned that by relying on our learning and reasoning, we become more successful than by relying on our instincts--such as the mythology of religion, which is built upon a set of instinctive universal motifs called archetypes.

How would that benefit the pack? That stifles genetic diversity, which is bad for survival. If you're talking about the men taking turns with the best looking female, it will reduce the number of children in the pack which is a great impediment to survival. Eventually the pack will become too small to function effectively.

You just don't understand that our genetic background is based on pack-social instincts, not lone hunter instincts. Notice that we did not evolve from tigers. We come from a long line of pack-social species in the class of primates, and the pack-social wolves/dogs (DNA shows them to be a single species) trotted right along with us into our prolific, well-fed civilization. Clearly pack-social is the more successful instinct.

It's because you have not studied enough biology and you're not working with the distinctions among the various types of animals. Humanism is indeed "true" to our species, in fact it's so powerfully "true" that it works for the world's first multi-species community.

Evolution got us to the point of developing pack-social behavior for us. Now it's up to us to transcend evolution using a different engine. That engine is the reason and learning that exists inside that massive forebrain that evolution also provided us.

Nothing! And that's the whole frelling point! We use our reason and learning to transcend instinctive behavior! Our motto as a species is: We can do better than nature! To deliver on my earlier promise...

Our pack-social instinct caused us to care about the extended family unit that we traveled with as nomadic hunter-gatherers. However, that same instinct caused us to regard other packs we encountered as enemies: competitors for the limited resources of our hunting and gathering territory. This trapped us in an equilibrium of instinct for millions of years. It was our experience with the dogs that got us out of it. (This is my own hypothesis but it's as good as any and it's consistent with the chronological data: the Mesolithic Era ended only a few thousand years after the self-domestication of dogs.) We had learned that two packs could be more successful working together than separately. There wouldn't be much advantage to simply joining two human-dog packs and hunting one territory, there wasn't enough game. But suppose one pack hunted in a game-rich savannah, while another worked a densely wooded area with little game but lots of vitamin- and mineral-rich fruits and nuts. And they started trading with each other.

Once packs started living in smaller areas, they could pay more attention to the miraculous way plants grew from seeds, using the cycle of weather. Once the technology of farming was invented, people could build permanent settlements and stop being nomadic. The two packs discovered that they could live in a single village, where economies of scale and division of labor multiplied the yield of their farming effort, creating the first surplus wealth. This trend continued as more distant packs combined into larger villages. All the while this required a constant override of the primitive pack-social instinct, as the "pack" became redefined from people you knew intimately from birth to people you traded with, to people you had encountered, to people that somebody else in the village knew. Our magnificent human forebrains allowed this; our primitive instincts were no match for the reasoning and learning that was making our Neolithic Era lives so much richer and safer than that of our Mesolithic Era ancestors.

Next thing you know we developed animal husbandry, creating an even larger food supply. Soon villagers felt like experimentally combining into cities--which required learning to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers and was the dawn of civilization.

This was all made possible by what you dismiss as "humanism"--the crazy idea that we human beings have the power to figure out what works best and the discipline to then live by those principles. And those principles worked very well. Since we have been living by them, progress has proceeded at an astounding pace. From the domestication of dogs it was about 5000 years to the first villages and the invention of farming. Then only about 2000 to the first cities. From then on the size of our "packs" increased rapidly until they became tribes, then nations. We now live in harmony and cooperation with citizens of a nation that we can't even count, much less name. Many of us are already able to extend that pack-social instinct to people on the other side of the planet who are merely abstractions to us.

All of this is possible because we have transcended evolution and instinct. And all of this works because we know how to use our reasoning and learning to transcend nature. This is humanism and it is not a belief, it is empiricism.

Once again, they are not, and that is the whole frelling point. We have transcended our genes. We have created civilization, which you could look at as a super-organism in its own right. It is a remarkable achievement, so durable that for about ten thousand years it has survived all of our worst follies such as war, religious intolerance and technologies that our brains could design but our morality wasn't quite yet ready for.

Humanism is not a "belief." You make it sound like some woo-woo that a priest chants to us. Humanism is the result of reasoning, an accumulation of ideas that have proven effective. At their core is the observation that humans are indeed capable of figuring out what works best, and calling those things "morality."

 

John J. Bannan:

The Golden Rule says: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It doesn't prevent anybody from acting in self-defence.

Humanism isn't based on evolution. Theories of "social Darwinism", based on "might makes right" aren't, either. Social Darwinism is bad, mmmkay?

Yes, it's purely man made - just like all religious morality.

Because humanism seems to be a superior ethical system.

To assume that what is "natural" is "more true" and therefore "more right" or a better basis for ethics is to commit the "appeal to nature" logical fallacy. Just because something is natural doesn't mean it is good, and just because something is not natural doesn't mean it is bad.

Who said we should base our morals around what our genes dictate?

This is a quite clear statement relying on the appeal to nature fallacy. Human is not "false" just because it is not "based in nature". You'll need a better argument than that.

No. That's the appeal to nature fallacy.