Godless Wednesday: Good Without God

Found an interesting blog devoted to atheism called Rosa Rubicondior.

One of the interesting posts on that blog I ran across recently was a discussion of the question of where atheists get their morality, if they do not believe in a supernatural, all-powerful being.

Here's a particularly pithy excerpt:

Do these people really believe that, before their holy book was written down and people heard about their god's laws, that people simply went around killing, raping, stealing and abusing children and it didn't occur to anyone that it was wrong in any way? Do they really believe that suddenly people heard of these new laws and thought, "Ah! In that case I had better stop this killing, raping, stealing and child abuse, or a god will punish me."? Is it realistic to assume that, before the Bible or the Qur'an were taken outside the Middle East to Europe and Asia, society consisted of people raping, murdering and stealing and that no child was safe? 

And what does it say of the person who is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly telling you that THEY see no reason not to murder, rape, steal and molest children other than the fear that a god will punish them? 

Who exactly has the morals here? The person who does right and avoids wrong because they know right from wrong, or more precisely, can work out what's right and what's wrong in a given situation because they can empathise with others and understand what it would be like to have a wrong done to them, or the person who is only hoping for a reward or avoiding punishment and needs to try to remember what an old book says and try to apply it to the situation at hand?

This is often known as the "Good Without God" argument and is also well articulated and illustrated by the cartoon at the top of this post.

What do you think?