Hello Angus
Ek sal miskien nie so ver gaan soos jy en Christene ateïste noem nie, maar ek kan definitief saamstem met jou dat hulle selde doen wat voorgeskryf word in hulle heilige boeke. Victor Stenger beskryf jou gedagtes (?) soos volg in God, The Failed Hypothesis – How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist (p.207-209):
Few modern Christians take the commands of the Bible literally. While they claim to appeal to scriptures and the teachings of the great founders and leaders of their faiths, they pick and choose what to follow – guided by some personal inner light. And this is the same inner light that guides nonbelievers ...
... As George Bernard Shaw commented, "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says. He is always convinced that it says what he means."
Every time a theologian reinterprets Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, he further reinforces my crucial point: we humans decide what is good by standards lying outside the scriptures.
Believers are guided by their consciences in deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, just as are nonbelievers. The basic notions of good and evil that we all share – believers and nonbelievers – are, for the most part, common and universal. Psychological tests indicate that there are no significant differences in the moral sense between atheists and theists.
In short, the empirical facts indicate that most humans are moral animals whose sense of right and wrong conflicts with many of the teachings of the great monotheistic religions. We can safely conclude they did not originate at that source ...
... If human morals and values do not arise out of divine command, then where do they come from? They come from our common humanity. They can be properly called humanistic ...You may call animal morality instinctive, built into the genes of animals by biological evolution. But when we include cultural evolution as well, we have a plausible mechanism for the development of human morality – by Darwinian selection. It seems likely that this is where we humans have learned our sense of right and wrong. We have taught it to ourselves.
Mooibly
Gilgamesh