Reply #207: You ask, "What is the atheist's moral authority?"

[stopbush]

Here ya go:

It's wrong because over the roughly 100,000 to 250,000 years that homo sapiens have existed on this planet, we have developed moral codes. These codes began as simple survival devices within small family units, expanded to family clans, then to small societal groups like villages, eventually encompassing entire cities, states and nations.

Our moral codes are STILL evolving: the rights of minorities and women, for example, are relatively new phenomena in our societies. Slavery - which is sanctioned in the Bible and other holy books - is now frowned upon by civilized societies. One can no longer make a moral argument for slavery as did slave holders in the South, who based their embrace of slavery on what Jesus and others said in the Bible.

There is no god involved in what we consider to be moral. In fact, the "morals" given to us by the various gods we've invented for ourselves always reflect the stage of moral development we had attained as a species when the idea of a particular god was formulated by the men who did the formulating. That's why religionists - Christians, in particular - ignore the immoralities professed by their god, failing to admit that these former moral positions are now considered to be immoral not because their god has provided them with a new commandment undoing the original commandment, but because our secular development has put paid to their religion-based immoralities.

How'd I do?