[David E]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

You're confusing atheism (or non-religiousness or whatever) with anarchy.

From this comment and others, I think you and other folks are equating atheism and non-religiousness. They are different. For example, many practicing Jews don't believe in God but want to preserve their traditions and pass their value system to the next generation. This is what I have been advocating; not necessarily belief in God ( my reference to the Voltaire quote acknowledges that God may be man-made), but the acknowledgement that our moral frame of reference comes out of a system of thought derived from religion.

I am not sure why you bring up anarchy, none of my examples are anarchists. All of them are motivated by the belief in pretty structured ideological systems (Maoist Communism, Jones Cult, Sharia Law). But since you bring it up, I guess one could add anarchists as another example of what is worrisome to me, that is people who think they are doing what's right and good, but are not, and justify it as their personal morality. (The anarchist would probably have some notion that people should be free from government oppression, etc.)

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Yes, he does think there's something wrong with murder. And so do most people, regardless of the existence of god. It doesn't require a belief in god to come to the conclusion that acceptance of murder is a bad thing.

What I am saying is that our definition of murder comes from a Judeo-Christian value system. The ancient Greeks and the Nazis both systematically killed or euthanized deformed, retarded, or incapacitated people, but they didn't think of it as murder; in fact, it was very rational in terms of the efficient use of resources and functioning of the society as a whole.

So, now from our present day perspective, can you tell me why murdering somebody is wrong? Putting God aside, as that can't be proven or disproven, the scientific facts we know are that we humans are a biological machine that runs on electricity and our emotions are based on chemicals like endorphins, dopamine, and hormones. Humans are easy to make; so easy that there is probably getting to be too many for the amount of resources available. So, what is wrong with eliminating some?
Just because it causes suffering? That doesn’t make something wrong, lots of things cause suffering that are morally neutral.

I would really like an answer, because the only one I know of is a religious one that says that every human has a supernatural component that gives it transcendent worth, a worth that is beyond that of an animal or a rock. But it’s not rational or scientific.

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

What he doesn't think there's anything wrong with is leaving it up to a reasonable social dialog to determine what is and isn't acceptable rather than relying on some external source of morality.

Our reasonable social dialog (which I am advocating) seems reasonable to you and I because we grew up with a common value system, (which is external). The Greeks and Nazis participated in a dialog that was reasonable to them too, but came up with a very different system.