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I was an atheist until age 23. Up to that time I cared about the difference between good and evil, in the sense that in my head I thought of most other humans beings as evil and hated them, and I listed a very few others as good. But I largely ignored any application of the principles of good and evil to my own life. For example, I believed that it was evil to ignore the plight of the poor, yet at the same time I rarely did anything to assist the poor myself.
Imagination is not necessary. There have been such societies, ranging from primitive tribes in the Amazon to modern-day examples such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, and China under Mao. You may personally feel that the culture of a primitive Amazon tribe is not evolutionary stable, but the tribesmen didn't seem to care very much. You may personally think that Stalin's leadership style wasn't evolutionary stable. but he apparently didn't get the memo.
Some do. Take cats, for instance. A male cat will kill any kittens that are not his direct descendants if he gets the chance to do so. He will also fight with any other male cat that he perceives as a threat to his territory, and the results of such fights are often fatal. Again, you can call it "not evolutionary stable" if you choose, but the cats don't seem to care.
First of all, there are many human beings who are not inherently selfish. People such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, and Mahatma Gandhi were not selfish. On the flip side, many people commit suicide, so some people obviously aren't survivors either. In the vast majority of murders, the perpetrator and the victim are family members. So obviously humanity as a whole has no inherent care for family. Some people choose to be selfish, some choose to care only about their families, some choose to care about all of humanity and some choose to care about nothing at all. Given the wide variety of different moral choices that people make, we can easily reject any claim that there is a single moral system "inherent" in all or most of humanity.
Truly? What about atheists such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tito, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Slobidan Milosevic, Park Kung Hee, who are responsible for murdering, torturing, and imprisoning millions of innocent people? Are they not evil in your book?
True. But everyone I know of who understands the world and his or her fellow human beings turns to God. Off the top of my head, I cannot name very many non-believers who I would expect very much empathy from.
In my hometown of Culpeper, VA, there is the Food Closet in St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, the Soup Kitchen in St. Luke's Lutheran Church, the St. Thomas medical clinic and so forth. On the other hand, I cannot recall hearing about the Friedrich Nietzsche Food Closet, where they hand out canned vegetables because it's beyond good and evil. I have never seen the Sigmund Freud Soup Kitchen, where they ladle out soup and lectures about the Oedipus complex. I have never encountered the Richard Dawkins medical clinic where they give free screenings to the poor because it's an evolutionarily stable strategy. Now perhaps these things exist and I missed them; all I can say with certainty is that I've never seen them. Hence I'm hesitant to rely on the generosity of atheists.
In 1972, the Club of Rome issued a report called The Limits to Growth, which stated that the world would run out of gold in 1981, mercury in 1985, tin in 1987, zinc in 1990, oil in 1991, and copper, lead, and natural gas in 1993. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb told us that there would be mass famine in the 1970's because the world would simply run out of land to grow food on. And in 2004, James Howard Kunstler said that the world had reached "peak oil" and gas stations were soon going to be running out. I figure that since all of these predicted catastrophes and a great many others failed to materialized, yours probably will as well.
