some of the most moral people i've ever met are atheists. their moral code exists for doing what they believe is right, not for acting out of fear.
Most of my friends and family are atheists. I'm not questioning their level of morality or character. I ask questions about the source of their values. I've never claimed to be a person of high moral character myself.
Some atheist posters here write as if morality just evolved within our DNA information coding. I do recognize that we all have a conscience. But, what I'm saying is that there's a cultural layer to morality. If you don't want to call that 'religion' because you think you're set apart in some way from dumb religious people, so be it. But, the source of your ethics is not logic.
In my personal experience, fundamentalist Christians are among the last people on the plane who should be lecturing anyone regarding ethics or morality.
Additionally, I find your attitudes about morality and it's derivation to be stereotypical in that you seem to believe your religion is somehow an arbiter of morality and ethics when in a historical sense, Christianity has been a wellspring of hate, derision and the source of divisions.
You can be a good person without giving two hoots about the jeebus, as billions of non-Christians prove every day. Christians think this world was nothing but barbarians before Jeebus-- when in actuality true barbarism sprung up rampantly
after Jeebus and his devoted fanatics started hacking at anyone who slightly disagreed with them (even the atrocities of the old testament pale in comparison to the holocausts, pogroms, wars and genocides that the teachings of Jeebus has inspired). You think the Greeks burned old women because they were witches? The greatest library of all time-- the Library at Alexandria --was created by the Greek Ionians-- men who believed in Zeus. It took a Christian to destroy their works and literally set us back 2,000 years. For god. Who, according to the bible, hates knowledge so much he made it the one thing forbidden in Eden-- "ye shall eat of all things but not of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge -- for on that day, ye shall die" (they didn't die, as the serpent pointed out, they lived; God lied, Satan told the truth-- how ironic)
The most basic rule of human sociality is non-zero-sum: no free lunch, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, reciprocity. This is because a society made up of cheaters will (obviously) become fraught with suspicion, distrust, and peril, and will eventually fall apart. So we come to a consensus, a social contract that we all agree to live by under threat of punishment (also agreed upon by the group), and
voilà —law, order, and stability. This is the template upon which all patterns of human society are formed. Here in the West, we've progressed through theocratic totalitarianism to liberal democracy. Thank goodness.
This template for writing this social contract is found throughout the world and can be highly effective in stabilizing the sometimes unpredictable dynamics of man and is often furthering to each respective society. It wasn't until the agricultural revolution, between eight and ten thousand years ago, that we began to group together in numbers beyond 100-200, and before then we were always on the move looking for food, resources, and clement weather. In other words, there wasn't much potential for large-scale clashes of cultures and societies. Of course, all that has changed now.
