Well said, Hamby. 

In his debates with Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza repeatedly quotes from The Brothers Karamazov:  "If god does not exist, everything is permitted."   We must acknowledge with some apprehension that this is true.  Our moral principles offer no iron-clad assurance against another Hitler/Stalin/Saddam etc. 

D'Souza proceeds to cite the death tolls for the Holocaust, the Gulag and the Great Leap Forward, to imply that atheists are responsible for far more deaths than the religious.  Laying aside his equivocation of the term "atheist", his argument in essence is "Atheists killed millions of people.  Therefore god exists";  or more honestly:  "Atheists killed millions of people.  Therefore we should believe in god".  The fact is, if we have to believe in fictions to keep ourselves from acting immorally (or to encourage us to act morally), then we are already screwed.  And if the only way to give the fiction any moral value is to play the numbers game ("The Inquisition was bad, just not as bad as the Holocaust" ), then the claim of absolute morality fails.  

At any rate, we still see theists often avail themselves of moral relativism:  "yahweh permitted (even commanded) rape & genocide in the old testament, but jesus changed that." "mohammed took a nine-year-old girl to bed, but that was culturally acceptable at the time."   Furthermore, since we evolve (both biologically and societally), it is worthless if not dangerous to consult ancient works of fiction for moral decision.  How can the bible or the qu'ran advise us on stem-cell research or nuclear arms? 

So I agree with D'Souza that without god, "everything is permitted" (although with god, everything is still permitted, only with god's blessing).  That may not be a reality worth celebrating, but it is still a reality, and we have to make the best of it.

I don't think I can bring myself to be afraid of this "godless morality".

It's like someone trying rocky mountain oysters for the first time, declaring them delicious and having a second helping, then panicking and vomiting when he's told what they are. Nothing really changed, but he panicked because he had some preconceived notions about eating bovine testes.

I made a career out of working with teens and young adults who were criminals - from robbers and drug pushers to rapists and murderers. They were all quite religious. Not a one thought what they did was wrong until we carefully instilled a sense of belonging to the society the found themselves in. No one does evil in their own eyes.

Then, and only then, did their religious beliefs also come to mean they'd be punished for their sins.

So, to me religion/god has meant nothing at all to morality, it has always been society and a sense of belonging that has motivated moral behavior.

Dumping god and religion suddenly (which won't happen) would only detach some from their sense of belonging, giving them the room to be immoral/amoral. As religion and god will only fade over a long, long time, children will grow up at first with a dual sense - religion and society, as it is for most now - and slowly the religion will fade, become just another aspect of what society is, then become vestigial with ritual for marriage, coming of age, and the like being all that's left. Morality will be driven still by what it always has been.

(Of course, that depends entirely on parents raising their kids with some competence. That won't always be, juvenile behavior management will always be necessary because not all humans can raise a child with even minimal competency.)

 I was intentionally trying to keep this article short because I realize a lot of people are in love with saying "tldr," a little internet slang I've just recently been introduced to -- "too long, didn't read."

There's a lot more to say about this, though.  For one thing, fear and amorality are hallmarks of the authoritarian personality.  That is, the more authoritarian someone is, the more likely they are to view the world as a scary place out to get them, and the more likely they are to be amoral.  This is almost a matter of definition, since authoritarians believe that human values derive from authority.  Morality driven by authority is not really morality at all.  It's a-morality, because a person's actions are judged by an arbitrary standard, not by their effect on other people.

What I hope to demonstrate is that even for fear driven authoritarians, there's still room for acceptance of real morality, even with its fuzzy edges.  Though morality does not come down from authority, it is within the authority of governments to make declarations regarding morality as it effects other citizens.  Of course, there's danger here, since legislating morality is a hallmark of fascist and totalitarian governments, but I suggest that understanding real morality will make this less likely.  A rational government would legislate only those actions which have real, demonstrable negative effects on other citizens.  Murder, theft, rape, etc, would clearly fall within this category while consenting sexual practice would not.  

Philosophers have tried this before, and failed, but never before have they had good science on their side.  If you take the natural consequences from several of my essays, you get a big picture of "How to Fix Society for Dummies."

Just for the hell of it, read all of these essays at once, even if you've read them before:

What Does Sugar Have To Do With Murder?!

Free Will: Why we don't have it, and why that's a good thing.

Godless Morality and Fear

When you put together all these ideas, here's what you get:

1) Humans do not have free will.  We are products of our environment and respond predictably to our environment.

2) Morality is an emergent property of consciousness and instinct.  It is subjective but not arbitrary.

3) Instinctive morality has no inherent value.  It must be judged against its results.

4) With these facts in mind, humans can build societies (environments) which will trigger people's reactions in ways beneficial to the society, thus improving the human condition.

The thing is, trying this without science won't work.  The model of absolute morality must be scrapped, and it must be realized that human nature can only be bent.  It cannot be remade.  Only by accepting human nature for what it is can we hope to get generally good results.  There is no utopia.  There will always be evil-doers.  We can reduce their number and the frequency and severity of their deeds by creating environments which make it worth their while to be good-doers.

I can't grasp the novel borrowed  " Without God, everything is permitted. " concept due to its failure to address the failure of morality even in theistic groups.  It seems to have the distinctive ring of a meme to it. It also fails to convey actual information.

To rephrase it ," Without Y, X is permitted. "

Y represents an unknown variable. We can make no knowledge claim pertaining to Y due to absence of information regarding Y.

X presents its own problems. We cannot take X as literal in its current context. With or without the unknown variable of Y, objects with mass still cannot travel faster than the speed of light. X must have a narrow realm to work within. Y must be explained until we can place X into context. As it is presented, the translation of the meme stands as " Without an unknown variable, everything we are capable of doing is permitted. "

Now that we have a frame of reference, " what we are capable of doing ", we can try to ascertain the unknown variable that might hinder what we are capable of doing.

It is clear that " God " does not hinder our actions. Apart from having no definition of God, we have knowledge of humanity doing what it is capable of without being hindered by unknown variables. Millions of people have been killed throughout history without the unknown variable of God interfering. What has interfered with massacres is organized human action working to counter the actions of other humans. Organized society is what prevents wayward humans from doing what they are capable of.

As myself and others have pointed out, society functions as an evolutionary ratchet, preserving actions that are beneficial to the group and weeding out actions that are detrimental. Despite ' what if ' scenarios offered by trolls on other threads, it is self evident that a group that embraces wholesale slaughter within the group will cease to exist. Any society that undertook such self destructive action would soon find the last member of the group holding a bloody club that he or she could not mate with.  Because of this, and thanks to natural selection, we can come to understand that society provides the concept of right and wrong out of necessity for survival.

At this stage we are able to provide arbitrary titles to our actions. Good is the title we give to beneficial actions, and evil to self destructive actions.  Each stable society will  hold common concepts of good and evil, because the internal events detrimental to a society are universal, not by some unknown variable, but by necessity. Existence of the concept of good and evil demonstrates the fact of evolution. The arbitrariness of the concept of good and evil is also a demonstration of evolution. If you think of each group as a different species competing for the same resources, you can begin to understand how the two faced nature of Biblical morality evolved. When group A needs a resource possessed by group B, group A will justify their actions by vilifying group B. When you vilify your rivals, it makes it easier to consider them less than human, and therefore killable.  Group B is granted ( from the perspective of group A, as in actuality group B already possesses these same internal survival attributes ) the arbitrary moral equality only when cooperation is needed between the two groups. As their trade and social bonds become more integrated, the two groups eventually come to hold that they, but not everyone else, are morally upright. The more global a society becomes, the more the self evident rules of survival apply to the world as a whole.

Having a broader picture of the arbitrary, changing, but collective nature of our concepts of right and wrong, we can now modify the original meaningless meme into one that makes sense. Having changed Y from an unknown to a known, we can make sense out of X in its original context and may reinsert it harmoniously. The coherent meme would read " Without an organized society, everything is permitted. ".

This is useful because it counteracts a nonsensical meme with one that conveys informaton possessing explanatory power. We are not reduced to an unintelligable catch phrase that is so common in religious circles, but something short and comprehendable. Too long have the memes been in the hands of the incoherent. We need to be using these tools to our advantage in order to enlighten, not stupidify, humanity.