[Mr. Silverback]

Does belief in God prevent a Mafia Don from ordering a hit? Is he more moral than the ‘atheist’ who goes to work every day to make an honest living?

Actually, such actions prove the Don doesn't have belief and the atheist does. If the Don murders people and says he folows the Way, the Truth and the Life, he is like a guy who says he believes in gravity but expects to park his car on air. Meanwhile, the atheist could be said to be following a moral code, and there's no such thing as a moral code without a codegiving God.

[DodoDreamer]

“Actually, such actions prove the Don doesn’t have belief and the atheist does.”

No disrespect meant on my part, but you’ve just entered into what we call a ‘circular argument’.

My personal belief is that, on average, religious people tend to be more moral than non-religious people, but that one cannot make any absolute statements that all morality comes from religion/God.

[RobbyS]

A professed Christians may be a practical atheist, while a professed atheist may be a practical Christian. The atheist doctor in A.J. Cronin’s “Keys of the Kingdom,” has many real-life counterparts and so there are many “Christians “who are not Christian. But the “bourgeois morality” that the flower children so scorned ultimately depends on a faith in Christ. Thomas Huxley and his successors simply substitute evolution for God as the “cause” of a morality the conventional morality that governed their lives. A later generation— in the “gay ‘90s”—when the sexual revolution really began—rejected this premise. The cold-blooded atheism of revolutionaries like Lenin never geneflected to this moral code. Hence we get the most murderous century in world history—so far.

[Richbee]

“There is no absolute truth”

Is that absolutely true?

“If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then…what is the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought…I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime.”

(Dahmer in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, 11/29/1994)

Ahem:

“Humanism is a philosophical, religious, and moral point of view.” (Humanist Manifestos I & II, 1980, Introduction, Paul Kurtz)

[PigRigger]

"there's no such thing as a moral code without a codegiving God"

I would say there is no "absolute" moral code without a codegiving God...or....do you believe a morality is absolute by it's very nature?

IMHO, without God, it is man who defines morality....and as we know...that what man believes shifts like the sands in a desert over time.....far from absolue.....unlike the rules that govern our reality...

[steve-b]

Meanwhile, the atheist could be said to be following a moral code, and there's no such thing as a moral code without a codegiving God.

Which of the following statements do you believe, given that one of them must be true if your assertion is correct:

1. The Code of Hammurabi is a forgery.
2. The Code of Hammurabi does not contain any moral assertions.
3. The ancient Babylonian gods actually existed.