If one doesn't believe in God, how can they believe in right and wrong? What defines right and wrong if there is no higher power setting down a natural law?
If there is no God, then human life is not sacred, not different from any other animal life; and essentially anything is permitted.
There can be no Laws of Nature if there is no Designer of Nature. To have Design—always takes a Designer.
It is why Atheism is arbitrary Ethics and irrational, since all Natural Laws prove design in Nature. When they throw out God, they can believe anything. Law becomes arbitrary and about “feelings”.
It is actually unconstitutional to throw out the idea of God from a country where we get our unalienable Rights from God. Our whole legal system is built on Universal Truths (which come from Natural Moral Law and Revelation). Both believe in the same Creator—a Universal Right and Wrong.
We can’t dump God—without dumping the entire premise of our Constitution. It is Unconstitutional to take an oath to office if one does not believe in Universal Truths and unalienable Rights which are also Absolute.
BTW, Since O. W. Holmes, Jr. our legal system has posited thousands of unconstitutional laws. John Marshall would have declared them Null and Void because they are contrary to the meaning and intent of our Supreme Law of the Land.
We need to get back to “Justice” and Just Law which can only promote Virtue and equality under the law—as described by Revelation and Natural Moral Law.
A Just Society HAS to be a Virtuous Society-—everyone since Socrates has known that! Justice IS a virtue-—and all the Virtues are connected and can’t exist separately.
As Socrates said; “Knowledge is Virtue; Ignorance is Vice.” Since all men want Happiness-—the ignorant are just uninformed as to what really determines long term happiness. They are misguided—thinking pleasures that really destroy all future happiness or great relationships will bring them happiness...but they never can. Knowledge is key.
It is how the Marxists are collapsing culture-—they took Knowledge out of the schools (John Dewey). They do not teach Virtue-—the only reason for education according to all Greek Masters and all the Founding Fathers and great Thinkers in their time (The Age of Reason).
The public schools now teach and condition our children into Vice and Atheism. They normalize evil and mock God and the idea of Universal Truths. Kids are ignorant when they graduate if not intercepted by good people in their lives. They force children to think in irrational ways—to think in Marxist way that there are no Laws of Nature and No God-—by forcing literature like Heather has two Mommies, And Tango Makes Three, Daddy’s Roommate, and the Evolution of Calpurnia Tate.
Children can be easily shaped into believing anything. Lenin knew this. All Marxists know to get the kids—you have future Marxist Atheists at best and useful idiots if not. Their ideas teach cognitive dissonance-—they teach “Lies” as Truth, which prevents children from forming logical, natural thinking patterns.
That part is easy - most secular humanists carry certain socialistic premises as intellectual baggage, most popularly that whatever benefits society as a whole is to be desired from the point of view of the individuals making it up. That premise is, to say the least, a little weak - it evinced itself in the thoroughly embarrassing atheist billboard campaign of a couple of years ago that proclaimed earnestly that one should "Be good for goodness' sake." Over and above the fact that this formulation came from a Christmas carol there is the difficulty that "goodness' sake" is quite a different thing from the point of view of the collective and the individual, and that apart from the cute phrasing there is nothing to suggest that the individual is in any way obligated to subordinate his immediate interests to those of society.
What defines right and wrong if there is no higher power setting down a natural law?
That one is much harder. Where there is no God there is no real ethical authority, nothing to prevent society from descending into nihilism. Friedrich Nietszche pointed this out, and when he famously suggested "God is dead", he was mourning.
But a principled atheist - never mind what source those principles, in fact, you'd be better off not inquiring too closely, because more often than not they'll be Christian - a principled atheist who does respect life for life's sake cannot avoid the conclusion that the unborn is human because it can be nothing else and alive because it can be nothing else - he or she can avoid this conclusion no more than the rest of us who have heard it from God's voice. Think of the lies you have to embrace to deny it - that the unborn is "undifferentiated tissue", "parasitical", and most of all, something less than human life. You have to swallow that stuff without regurgitating. Best of luck.
So yes, I do believe that an atheist with a sonogram and a book on embryology can conclude that abortion is an act of murder, even without divine authority backing him or her up. It's a step, a step toward enlightenment, a very dangerous step, because it's a step toward God. All IMHO, of course.
I am not an atheist but I would surmise that it doesn’t
take a believer to understand the usefulness of societies
and that for societies to succeed there are “do’s and
don’ts”
Atheist do not realize that they get their concepts of right and wrong from a culture that has been based on the belief in God. They think that they get their understandings of right and wrong from their own self reasonings, without realizing that their whole lives have been steeped in thoughts arising from the concept of God. Unless a change comes, the basics of right and wrong will disappear as the knowledge of God and righteousness quickly washes out of a society that has left it behind.