I'm going to play devil's advocate here.
While it's nice to think of religion as being simply blind unreasoning faith, except in very rare cases that isn't really how it works. The religious discuss and analyse their own beliefs extensively, and produce reams of discussion material on the subject. So while there is certainly a sense of adhering to a common set of values and conclusions based on same, such adherence is not necessarily blind.
Faith is by definition unreasoning and blind to evidence. Martin Luther, correctly said that "Reason is the enemy of faith.", except he said it as an attack on reason, which is in fact the anti-intellectualism that was and is at the heart of the Protestantism he helped give birth to.
Religions promote faith as a virtue, because they know that their core beliefs dissolve when exposed to reason. Thus, those who actually apply reason to their religion invariably abandon religion, leaving those who don't apply reason to
Pseudo-intellectual "discussions" in which the core assumptions are never allowed to be questioned is still blind faith, just with the added quality of being dishonest and not admitting to that faith and trying to steal intellectual legitimacy. In addition, two faithers arguing with each other but not actually willing to take the other's arguments seriously is also still blind faith. Blind faith and active self-delusion is how all theists do and must retain their religion.
The fact is that nearly every core idea of theistic religion is so absurd and contradicted by fact and reason that only blind, delusional refusal to reason is capable of maintaining such beliefs.
Meanwhile, over in atheism, atheists are free to create a coherent system of ethics, principles and values for themselves and other atheists to adhere to. But most don't do any of that themselves - they simply adhere to someone else's just as the religious do.
Secular ethics come to be and survive only because they make sense to the majority of people. By definition, there is no authority to defer to. This is why the non-religious are far less likely to endorse moral mandates that prescribe private behavior with no clear harm to another's person or property. They are far less likely to say something is immoral just because they personally do not like it. Religionists do this regularly, because there is no rational basis to determine God's will, thus they can just make their own will God's will, and thus their own tastes dictate morality.
For nearly every moral advancement, secularist have been ahead of the curve and far more likely to among the minority in society pushing for a moral change in the transition period where the old morality is still dominant. There was very little overall moral progress (if anything regress) from the time of the ancient greeks to the Enlightenment, because religion determined morality and dominated society. The rise of secularism triggered by the Enlightenment coincides strongly with the exponential increase in the rate of moral and political progress over the last 300 years. Of
And in reality those systems are less considered and less analysed than those of the religious, which tend to have evolved over many hundreds of years.
Religious ethics have only progressed due to the external pressure of secular ethics. Their is no other possibility, because their is no mechanism for internal evolution in ethics for religion. The source of religious ethics is the authoritarian decrees of God. Since all of these are invented and cannot be judged by mere human minds, there is no mechanism for internal progressive change. Sometimes their is change within religion, but it is arbitrary based upon the authorities want to say to benefit themselves or ensure the future power of their religion. Secular ethics is what modern law is based upon, namely the core principle of not harming others or infringing their liberty, except if neccessary to protect oneself from the harm caused by those others actions. This principle is what makes secular ethics far more principled and coherent, despite far less time for development. Religious ethics have zero principle to create logical coherence. Every decree need only be God's will and that will need not be coherent or principled or applied equally to logically equivalent situations.
That leaves atheism with it's great ability to choose your values rather than have them issued to you. But do people choose values? I mean do you sit down and decide for yourself whether harm to others is something you should avoid?
Yes. Like all non-sociopaths, I have a natural sense of empathy, and I have an ability to predict the mutually beneficial results from a social contract based upon core principles. Unlike religious people, I can and do actually apply these to determine the moral principles I adhere to, and use logic and reason to ensure that I apply those principles consistently. Religious morality commands that if authoritarian decrees run counter to natural empathy or a principled social contract, or consistent application, then those things must be disregarded.
What could such a contemplation ever be based on? All values either come down to what an acquaintance described as 'The Master or the Void'. Either your value judgements are based on some absolute authority, typically religious, or they're based on nothing at all. Atheism avoids the Master quite neatly, but only by promoting the idea that morals shouldn't be based on anything solid at all. Some people may find that a hard sell.
Authority is nothing at all, when that authority doesn't actually exist. Religious morality is just the whim of a small number of human authorities. Secular morality requires widespread agreement for their to be any shared system of rules. This requires core principles consistently applied or their will be no widespread agreement. It leads to a pro-liberty principle in which each person's own will controls their own actions, which entails a logically inherent boundary and limit where actions begin impede another person's will over their body and actions. It is not at all coincidence that the valuing of reason, secularism, and democracy coupled with individual rights and autonomy arose together from the Enlightenment through today. They are inherently mutually reinforcing, and religion and faith are inherently at odds with all of them.
If values are instead based on our instincts, honed over thousands of years of evolution, then we don't really choose them, and we can expect to find generally the same moral principles in theism as in atheism.
Not true. The authoritarian basis of religious morality allows it to completely disregard ethical instincts, such as natural empathy, and to disregard whether one decree is logically contradictory to another. Religious authority also abuses some natural feelings and perverts them into harmful moral extremes, such as with homosexuality. When obedience to God is the definition of "good", then heinous acts that violate natural empathy to the point where they cause the actor physical pain will still be engaged in and justified. In fact, most theistic religion treats listening to your own natural empathy as an immoral selfish act of disobedience. In addition, natural empathy carries far more influence on ethics when those ethics emerge from the bottom-upward via democratic and a shared social contract rather than authoritarian decree of a God. A single authority can easily (and usually do) ignore their own empathy in favor of other self-serving goals. However, a populace free to come to an agreed social contract will not share all the same self-serving goals, but will share natural empathy. THus, empathy has a greater impact on secular morality than religious morality, and arbitrary decrees that are harmful to many or even most people are far more likely to shape religious morality than secular morality.
Non-theistic ethics are responsible for all of the massive progress in ethics and principles of justice over the past several centuries.
why would you think that.
Because there is a highly systematic covariance both across time and between cultures at any given time. And when religion rules a society, their is little moral progress, and any "change" is as likely to be regressive or just arbitrary based on the whim of an authority (like a king wanting to get divorced).
And does that mean that theistic ethics were responsible for all the reforms before then? If so, why did they suddenly stop?
In any society there are religious and secular forces impacting ethics. They vary over time and culture in their relative impact. When religion has dominated, moral progress toward equality and respect for individual autonomy has been very minimal and due to the minimal impact that secular forces had. Rate of progress has greatly accelerated in the West, due to the increased influence of secularism. That rate of moral progress has predictably not increased within societies still very directly ruled by religion (e.g., most of the Arab world).
We may still sometime act in the heinously immoral, racist, sexist, and genocidal ways advocated by the Bible, but at least most of the modern secular world now recognizes such acts as immoral and that references to the Bible, God or other religious authority has no bearing on whether such acts should be allowed.
The thing is, most of the religious world doesn't practice those ways either.
I mean how many priests do you think regularly stone people to death for eating beef on Friday, approaching a church altar while wearing spectacles, or committing adultery?
They don't stone women, because the secular world won't let them. That is why the "priests" very much still do stone people (such as women) and command others to do so, wherever their is no secular force of decency to keep them in check. In the West, they are forced to limit their henious immorality, but still push the boundaries of it whereever they can, such as advocating hatred, violence, and the lack of human rights for homosexuals, promoting racism and sexism in every way they can legally get away with, and trying to smash individual liberty in general. The degree to which the religious do and advocate these things in the West is directly related to their degree of religiosity, as countless research shows. The most progress people in the West are those least confident in any religion or God, and who think about and value religious ideas very little in their actual political and daily judgments.
IOW, monotheistic religion is only not a source of authoritarian destruction and inhumanity when it isn't really monotheistic religion, but rather secularism practiced by people who want to keep their religious label.
