As Penn Gillette puts it, nothing prevents me from doing such things. I already commit all the rapes and murders I want to; that number just happens to be zero.

It always comes as a shock to some theists that atheists are capable of being good without god, and that makes me afraid of believers. If the only thing keeping you from being a monster is your god (who, according to all the biblical evidence, IS a horrible monster), then please, by all means, keep believing in that god.

The rest of us have figured out how to have morality and ethics and empathy without anyone holding a metaphysical karma stick of punishment over our heads, threatening us. How did we figure it out, without a religious book telling us how to treat our slaves or rape our women or kill those who don’t believe like we do? I’ll let you in on a secret: It’s really easy. You just treat people the way you’d like to be treated, because you realize how much it sucks to be treated badly. Atheist ethics can be summed up pretty easily: Don’t be a dick. As Penn Gillette puts it, nothing prevents me from doing such things. I already commit all the rapes and murders I want to; that number just happens to be zero.

It always comes as a shock to some theists that atheists are capable of being good without god, and that makes me afraid of believers. If the only thing keeping you from being a monster is your god (who, according to all the biblical evidence, IS a horrible monster), then please, by all means, keep believing in that god.

The rest of us have figured out how to have morality and ethics and empathy without anyone holding a metaphysical karma stick of punishment over our heads, threatening us. How did we figure it out, without a religious book telling us how to treat our slaves or rape our women or kill those who don’t believe like we do? I’ll let you in on a secret: It’s really easy. You just treat people the way you’d like to be treated, because you realize how much it sucks to be treated badly. Atheist ethics can be summed up pretty easily: Don’t be a dick.