Every person needs at the center, some sense of meaning about existence. It is life and death to us, it makes us who we are. Yet most of us, as we grow up and become responsible adults, accept that life is complex, that we live in a world of subtle shades, not sharp, black and white. I worry that these bornagains are being persuaded to return to childish certainties. The only choice they need is God.
Russell's teapot
agnostic不可知论者
Teapot-atheist无茶壶（神）论者
We are all atheists about most of the gods that society has had ever believed in. Some of us just go one God further.

For many people, part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith. With a good strong dose of rational thinking. But if an individual doesn't succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy.

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, who is God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury as well as execution victim.(hhhh

Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad. (so ture

--I reckon I have a fairly strong moral conviction as well, but I am not that confident I wouldn't like to go kill somebody for the sake of my morality. How could you be that confident?
--I think my own confidence, I guess, has come with time... the more... I think the scriptures, the more I live the more ...satisfied, I am intellectually that they interpret reality for me.

'Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'

So it's a question of the changing facts as well as a changing understanding of how the Bible should be interpreted.
I think that moderates need to be passionate both about their religious beliefs and about rationality, and it's possible to be a passionate moderate.

Some say that while religious fundamentalists betray reason, moderate believers betray reason and faith equally. The moderate position seems to me to be fence sitting.

Morality stems not from some fictional deity and his texts, but from altruistic genes that have been naturally selected in our evolutionary past.
You can think of chimps is MS DOS and humans is Windows 2000. (hhh
But it is surely far more moral to do good things for their own sake rather than as a way of sucking up to God.
Morality is a lot older than religion, humans have an innate moral sense or a range of moral senses.(所谓人类不需要宗教而写在基因里的“道德感”（利他性）

The progressive shift often emerges in opposition to religion, it's driven by improved education and that expressed by newspaper editorials, television soap operas, parliamentary speeches, judicial rulings and novels.

I guess my starting point would be the brain is responsible for consciousness. We could be reasonably sure that when their brain ceases to be when it falls apart, decomposes, that'll be the end of us. From that, quite a lot of things follow, I think specially morally, we are very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness. And we therefore have to take responsibility for it.
This gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.

The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
To think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permitted. You and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive. And we should make the most of our time. On this world.