Should Animals Have the Same Rights as People?

In response

Thank you for your well thought out and intelligent response. To treat it with brevity would be a disservice, so please allow this lengthy retort. For the sake of our convenience, I have broken it down into sections so that each may be aswered with as little confusion as possible.

1. "logical basis for determining right and wrong within an atheistic worldview". Do no harm would be my first response to this. If one steals, or kills, etc then the answer is quite obvious. When you harm another, you commit a crime against humanity. But let's take something more abstract. Let's use lying for example. When you lie to another you inevitably get caught. When you do, there are many social ramifications. It creates a very complex situation where one did not exist. The most important being the loss of trust. When one cannot trust their closest of relationships, the "tribe" falls apart. Take that up a notch and witness how we feel about our politicians lying to us. We are not angry that they broke a commandment, we are angry that we cannot trust them. Our "tribal leadership" is damaged. These internalizations only affect us because we have invested emotion in our system. To the person that truly doesn't care about the system scoffs at the lie and it has no bearing on them internally. Or at least they profess this to be true.

2. "wrong in some societies". Indeed this is exactly correct. Moral relatavism exists in all facets of life. This crosses all cultures and religions. What a muslim finds to be immoral, a christian may not, etc etc. I make no excuses for relativism. If you would allow, these relativisms lose foothold as societies merge and advance. There is a very temporal aspect to relativism. Growing pains if you will. Human sacrifice once thought perfectly acceptable to satiate the gods has all but disappeared globally. Capital punishment, in contrast, is still allowed by many faiths or lack of. I would argue that the American society will discard even capital punishment at some time. If this assertion is correct, we will look backward and call it brutality and primitive.

3. "Ethics should be based on reality and be logically consistent." "the reason to want to do right" I would like to
answer these together. Your statement on ethics should be the recruitment poster for atheism. As to the "reason to want to do right" I would defer to do no harm. While you may disagree, I find greater satisfaction in somone doing something right because they chose to not harm humanity, that out of love / fear of a creator. It is precisely this advancement in humanity that I long for. The greater quesion here is compassion. Why do some people have it in spades, and others scarcely? Why do some animals exhibit compassion? The answer lies within nature / nurture and one I am not qualified at this time to answer. I could wax philosophic, but it would not satisfy the requirements of the question.

4. Functional atheism:
"This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen" Parker Palmer.
Addressing selfishness and "sin" in a persons life must be the goal of all. It's just that as an atheist, I don't need to abdicate it's originality. Only for a bit of fun here allow me this. "Atheism: The conscious, examined conviction......."

5. "Even as an atheist, if you live the morals you teach and have a healthy relationship with your kids , you are likely to have good results by your standards". Indeed. And this would be passed down the line branching outward. Pretty idealistic I realize.

I very much want to address the "have purpose" part of your response. I absolutely agree with you. I was unaware that I was in the minority of atheists on this point, if I am. I would not argue that we had a purpose, other than to procreate and for our species to survive. Even that is questionable. The earth would survive with or without us. So as to any purpose, one would have to have the thinkings of a theist, I would think.

You and I have consistently been on the "same page" with animal rights . The bestowment of human rights is something that only a human could do. That's why they are human rights. Habeas Corpus, the right to own property, etc are human rights. And indeed, they are only rights because we made them up. And I know that you do not disagree that we should treat animals with compassion.

I sincerely hope that I have responded to you with both respect and civility. I do very much acknowledge that my answers are vague in areas. I did not want to address your particular religion , so I treated the responsed in a rather generic fashion.