Why we need an atheist movement?

Because Religion’s morality has failed

Mr. Kenneth Bronstein

[The author is the President of the New York City Atheists Inc.]

Religionists are always asking us, “How can Atheists possibly be moral?” What they mean, of course, is how can anyone be moral without the fear of god or the threat of punishment in hell. Yet, despite religion’s exclusive claim to morality, and despite more than 2,000 years to perfect their system, religion and the churches have failed abysmally to create a moral, just or principled world.
Let’s define “morality” : According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, morality is (a) a doctrine or system of moral conduct; (b) particular moral principles or rules of conduct; (c) conformity to ideals of right human conduct.
Religion violates own codes
In all of today’s religious systems, in which rules of moral conduct have been written down, studied and revered since the Bronze Age, where is the agreement on, or enforcement of moral conduct or the rules of conduct? Apparently, there is enough latitude in all current religious systems to allow for violation of moral rules of conduct without accountability or reprisal, or - in some cases - without any challenge at all, particularly, it appears, when the violation is committed en masse.
For example, “Thou shall not kill”, which is a moral imperative in almost all religions, is violated every day by allegedly “moral” governments hungry for oil or control or moralistic about imposing their own form of government on another country, generally in the chauvinistic belief that the predator’s form of government is superior. Yet Christianity’s 10 commandments do not say “Thou shall not kill except in Iraq or whenever you don’t like someone else’s “regime”. The commandments do not say, “Thou shalt not kill one-on-one but it’s okay for 160,000 young men in uniform to decimate a whole population.” Despite religion’s lip service to “morality”, it flouts its own rules of conduct every day, in instances too numerous to count, in ways that cause death, genocide, hunger and suffering, and impede the progress of humanity.
Religious morality flouted
Or take religion’s rule in relation to sexual conduct. So many of religions’s “Thou Shalt Nots” have been violated by religious leaders - the very leaders who tout the morality of religion- from the Fundamentalists’ Reverend Ted Haggard’s trysts with a male prostitute to Catholic Priests’ sexual abuse of altar boys to the Hassidim’s virtual imprisonment of their women folk by relegating them to domesticity and childbearing, to the Muslim execution by stoning of women who have been raped or adulterous.
This is religious morality? I hold that religion’s doctrines of moral conduct, based on a 2000-year belief scheme, have failed. Judeo-Christianity’s Bronze Age religious morality is archaic, contradictory and too vague. When those in power can interpret the moral code to suit their own purposes, when genocide, hunger, poverty and warfare are still rampant in a world that can, ironically, find a way to get to the moon - then our priorities are wrong and our prevailing morality has failed.
I urge that religion’s so-called “morality” be replaced by modern, scientific, logical, Atheist and humanist 21st century morality codes such as those outlined in the United Nations’ Universal declaration of Human rights, that children worldwide be educated in its percepts, not out of fear of a god or of punishment after death, but simply because this moral code lays out the foundation of the right things to do for the continuation, health and progress of humanity.