[Displaced Flames fan]

Originally Posted by troutman

most civilized people, religious or not follow a moral standard that has its roots in religion [MelB]

I don't think this is true at all. If people truly got their morals from religion, we would be stoning adulterers to death. Ethics have a naturalistic origin - it benefitted society that people did not harm each other.


Ethics and morality are much older than Christ. People don't derive these values from the Bible.

Before Moses spoke to the burning bush, did people really think it was okay to murder and steal?

Hitchens makes this point very well in his opening statement in this debate:

http://www.richarddawkins.net/articl...lister-McGrath

The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudiementary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading - and, indeed most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in many cases. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world . . . concern for others was not the invention of any prophet. [Harris, p. 172]

See my reply to IFF above.