[ohioWfan]

What an interesting twist on what I said. You are quite creative in trying to set up an impossible hypothetical to accuse me with and then feign sympathy for me. I am amused.

You make absolutely no point in the debate on logic or reason, but you definitely deserve points for creativity, sir.

[Asphalt]

You make absolutely no point in the debate on logic or reason, but you definitely deserve points for creativity, sir.

Wow. I wish I could have put it that well. I'll have to remember that for future threads.

[Right Wing Professor]

You are quite creative in trying to set up an impossible hypothetical to accuse me with and then feign sympathy for me. I am amused.

It's not an impossible hypothetical - lots of people were once Christian and then decided they aren't any more - and it's not feigned sympathy. I truly feel sorry for someone who has to cling to a strange and obsolete theory of the world because they're afraid that if they don't, they'll turn into a monster.

FWIW, in addition to a rational basis, I think that quite a bit of morality is 'hard-wired'. The incest taboo is an example. Brothers and sisters almost never want to have sexual relations, even in the absence of a moral code forbidding it. There's just a natural revulsion to it. Likewise, we have a natural and very sensitive cognitive facility for detecting cheating, and an equivalent dread of being caught. Steven Pinker in 'How the mind works', has an excellent discussion of our internal ethical compass and how it evolved in order to make reciprocal altruism possible.

So, oddly enough, I have a higher opinion of you than you have of yourself. I'm sure that even if you were a 'rabid atheist' like myself, you would probably behave pretty much as ethically as you do now. There are certainly bad people in the world, but there's precious little evidence a religion ever made a bad person good.