Do ethics matter?
If so, why?
You are your own god. You need to live with yourself. My ethics are not absolute, but they work for me. And they're better than most peoples. (relatively speaking, the slime that hurts others, sues people, calls cops on neighbors, etc)
I can sleep at night knowing I have lived up to my personal beliefs. I am not bothered by my actions.
My question is, why is this directed at athiests? Do you actually believe the religious are not flawed, or their behaviors are ethical without question? There are levels of belief, you know, and one of the first things people learn to rationally mistrust and/or disrespect is those who do not "practice what they preach". If I had to define "unethical" it would begin, right off the bat, with people who hypocritically hold others to a faith-standard that they themselves do not employ.
Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") has three principal meanings.
In its first, descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct or a set of beliefs distinguishing between right and wrong behaviors. In its descriptive use, morals are arbitrarily and subjectively created by philosophy, religion, and/or individual conscience.
Theres more in there about rational personal behavior than religion, me boy. The sky-wizard is not a necessary component. I won't catapult straight into religion causing more damage than its done good, because I don't want to turn this into an immediate insult-fest. But that is an ethical and moral extension that is worthy of consideration, meaning the purposeful perpetuation of a practice that divides people and causes unrest between groups. Personally, I don't condone that shit being out of the house. If the public organized practice of your beliefs effect others negatively, perhaps they are unethical practices. I know my life would probably be very different if there wasn't a clash between religions happening in the world around me. You may be peaceful, and thats good, but you're still a part of it. And I'll tell ya, I don't appreciate it very fuckin' much when this shit effects me.
Be that as it may, there is still personal philosophy and conscience to contend with. 2/3rds is the bigger half. So a vaunted perspective of religion is inappropriate in the construct of moral and ethical behavior, bring it down to earth with the pagans, walk among us, you'll be better for it.
I hate to shit the whole thing up by quoting George Carlin, but he does a piece where he boils the ten commandments down into two, I think. Don't kill, and don't steal. Maybe three, don't lie, but sometimes lies are necessary, so he may have wiggled out of that one. The rest is condensed into those two. Its all I've ever really lived by, and I don't need a god or a comedian to tell me that. We can all agree thats some important shit there. The rest is subjective, sometimes its necessary to do stuff. But more importantly, and all encompassing, THOU SHALT NOT EFFECT OTHERS. That is your big and absolute moral. Its like the safety seal on the package of cookies. Once you open the bag of THOU SHALT NOT EFFECT OTHERS, you're in. And it better be some goddamn win. You better be sticking cookies
in the bag, or saving your own ass from a whole pile of fuck.