Actually you guys bring up some good points.. I suppose I could become an Atheist.. we're all searching for something.. right?
I think becoming
anything because you're "searching" is the wrong reason. Remember, atheism is one position on one issue. You cannot build an entire worldview around one issue.
I (briefly) made a similar mistake as a teen. I was already an atheist at that point, but I was "searching." I eventually ran across the works of Anton LaVey, and decided to go along with it since it was an "atheist religion." After about a year I figured out that Satanism was completely psychobonkers, but in the meantime I came very close to destroying a lot of friendships over my new pet religion. It's not something I look back at with pride.
I'm currently a Secular Humanist; not because I picked it as a new pet ideology, but because I agree with its central philosophy. I used that philosophy to, among other things, rebuild my moral compass from the ground up. Any time I find something in that moral compass that's left over from my upbringing, I question it, and I try to decide if it's worth keeping. If I can't decide, I try to get better informed so that I can come back to the issue; often through research, but sometimes through classes.
"Ground-Up Morality," as I like to call it, tends to be completely alien to a lot of theists I talk to. Unlike "Top-Down Morality," there is no god whose teachings it will ever agree with. Indeed, many conclusions reached by TDM are either contradicted by GUM, or ignored altogether. To some groups, it might sound like just an excuse to commit acts of sin as such. If you envision these two moral systems as pyramids, though, it makes a lot more sense.
TDM is like an upside-down pyramid. It covers a lot of subject matter at the top, but there really isn't much on the bottom to support it. The conclusions it reaches are juicy targets for questioning, and the only thing keeping the pyramid from tipping over is the apologists who rush in to right it again; though the apologists themselves might say that the hand of an almighty being actively prevents the pyramid's fall anyhow. GUM, on the other hand, is just a plain old pyramid. Compared to TDM, there really isn't a whole heck of a lot of stuff at the top; but what
is there is in very little danger of ever failing, because there's so much to hold it up that this morality pyramid is more than capable of standing on its own.
GUM can be mistaken for the Golden Rule (which, contrary to popular belief, did
not originate from Jesus, but rather Confucius), but there are some key differences. To start with, the actual words "treat others as you wish to be treated" will never be found in a GUM system; in fact a true GUM starts with "how I want to be treated" and "how others want to be treated" as two separate concepts, and they typically don't intersect until you actually reach your conclusion(s). Second, any GUM system
has to apply that second part in a selfish manner in order to make any sense. (In contrast to the Golden Rule, which has you apply it for no reason other than it's how
you would want to be treated. Sounds good, but it's actually quite weak as an argument.) The reason for this, of course, is that
everything must be justified from the ground up. These concepts, for example, are drawn from basic, biological survival needs, which is about the lowest ground you could possibly build up from. (Again, contrast to the Golden Rule, which tries to support a concept with a concept: sounds good, but very weak as an argument.)
So if you want an example, any moral conclusions drawn from "how others want to be treated" ultimately has to come from a survival perspective: "How is this going to affect
me?" As a pack animal who will ultimately be driven by instinct to form social bonds during encounters with other members of your species, particularly with relatives, another question you have to resolve is, "How is this going to affect
me and mine?" So in the end, how you treat other people is going to be determined by how you believe they will react. Many conclusions, such as "do not steal" and "do not murder" can be reached through this method; but of course, you're not using
one method to arrive at them. Starting from "how I wish to be treated" will bring you to the same conclusions, reinforcing them, but not actually crossing over with that other chain of logic. Now you have two conclusions, each being doubly reinforced. Of course, these two angles we just used to approach those conclusions are not the only two you can use; in my case, personally, I think I have at least a couple dozen chains of logic anchoring these conclusions alone. We'll leave that discussion for another time, though.
What I hope I've gotten across with this is that I'm not an atheist, agnostic, Secular Humanist, or whatever else just for shits and giggles. I didn't arrive at this position by "searching." I did some serious research and a lot of serious thought to get where I am today. And you know what? I'm not finished. I will never be finished, and I'm not even sure if I want to be finished. The combination of external and internal discovery that constructing, knocking down, rebuilding, and reinforcing this moral pyramid keeps me sharp; staying sharp keeps up my mental wellbeing; my mental wellbeing is one of the basic imperatives of my moral pyramid. Therefore, I have a moral obligation to never stop doing this. Oh, hey, look what I did there. Hehe.
Good golly that was long-winded of me, I apologize. I don't usually do the wall-of-text thing.
