And my point is that the most devout Christian will still do whatever he/she thinks is in their best own interest. The difference might be that the Christian is motivated because of the promise of eternal life but that doesn’t mean that the moral code differs much, if any, from an atheist perspective. They can have the same sense of right and wrong and react to situations in the exact same manner.
The principles that Christ espoused are universal, and they are the truth whether or not one believes in the rest of the rest of the stuff. One can believe those principles whether or not they have ever even heard of Jesus.
Atheists certainly can be amoral, but that doesn’t automatically mean that they are. If your point is that “right and wrong” cannot logically exist outside of a context of God, I think I have to fundamentally disagree. There is no dispute that muslim suicide bombers fervently believe in God, but that really has no bearing on whether their actions are right.
Jesus’s words would be correct even if there is no God at all. Right and wrong are concepts that stand alone. Whether they’re eventually enforced by a divine being is a somewhat separate issue.
I agree with you that atheists/darwinists can live a moral life, they simply cannot justify their decision to do so. To subscribe to Natural Law of Natures' Law (as did our founders) portends a Lawgiver. To say it is our nature is tantamount to admitting there is a God. In your examples, even the atheist know it is wrong to kill, steal, or lie,...all prescriptions written on every mans' heart. That is natural law. These are self-evident knowledge. Many people lie, steal, and kill, but they know it is wrong. These absolute moral obligations is binding, at all time,in all cultures. The implication is that there is a Moral Lawgiver. Otherwise, in our nation, atheists could proclaim murder as a virtue and gratitude is vice. In an materialistic, darwinist, naturalistic world, they might assert the virtue of hate and abhor the vice loving thy neighbor. C.S.Lewis said it this way, "Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well imagine a country where 2 plus 2 = 5.
We can't not know that killing innocent human beings for no reason is wrong. Some people deny it, or commit murder anyway, but they cannot not know it is wrong.
With the Darwinist atheist materialist they profer that there must be a gene for hate, conciousness, hope, love, justice, beauty, and so on. It can be no other way.
This is not to say that there doesn't comes a time with a hardened heart prevent the recognition of this natural law. If you read Weikart book he details meticulously how the intellengencia of Germany corrupted an entire nation, and nearly France, England, and the USA by redefining a morality around Darwinian evolution. Right became might (Rex-Lex). Morality became that which propelled the highest level Eastern European stock to a greater evolutionary scale. Contrarywise those of Inferior evolutionary stock were immoral for taking resourses from the superior. They organized an entire evolutionary ethic around their assertion that through natural selection this was the only morality. Once this effused throughout the country and western Europe they set up mechanisms to implement this morality with culminated in the eugenics movement, the holocaust, and the abortion industry's systematic extermination for the benefit of the superior stock.
There were even those that said warring Homo sapien was a derivitive of genetic code as the superior races would alway prevail over the inferior, stock. You know they even gave numerical value to people, the superior with positive numbers, the middle of the roaders with 0, and the inferior, eaters and wasters of resources as a negative number. The German Society for Ethical Culture, founded in October 1892, was the first to attempt to organize secular ethics in Germany. Felix Adler, an American professor who had already organized a similar society in the USA gave the eugenics society in Europe this idea. Besides Gizycki, Wilhelm Foerster, an astronomer at the Univeristy of Berlin, played a leading role in establishing the guiding ethics for the Ethical Culture Society. At their first meeting he said, "In the deepest sense of the biological theory of evolution, we are of the conviction that the human soul is the ultiate aim of this evolution on the earth, insora as the refinement of its senses and the ennobling of its thinking will produce the feeling and the knowledge of a amore comprehensive fellowship of happiness and unhappiness, of pleasure and pain, and the unifying consciousness of humanity." Sort of sounds like the New Age Movement in the USA. They, too, say the negative elements of Gaia must be cleanse and removed to a disembodied state to "catch up" with the upcoming evolutionary "jump" in Homo sapien which will spontaneously evolve to Homo noeticus (new man). Gee, sort of sounds like punctuated equilibrium, and it sort of seems like the "disembodiment" of Christians and Jews is the killing of them....disembodiment. They say it, not me.
Yes, there is nothing new under the sun.
These are some of the reasons bad ideas leading away from Truth is important. People, nations,.....make decision on their perception of Truth, and results can be horrific.