Great arguments to use against Bible Thumpers!

[OrphanPip]

I tend to think everything is but speculation, all we can go by is probability. And indeed many of the things considered were illogical. But many of the things were valuable and are what informed our current morals of those both atheist or otherwise. For example personally I think that God is The Everything, not some personified, or otherwise partial-to-the-universe entity. Like wise I still find such as plausibly sentient given the probability of infinite complexity of which our own minds are but a subset...

No, I think my morals derive more directly from Enlightenment ideas drawing off Greco-Roman ideas. Even with that, I think it is silly to act as if the Israelites or early Christians had some sort of special insight into morality. There is generally little variance amongst moral principles between different groups. Looking to the values and ideas, which is problematized by the issue of authorial intent being impossible to fully access, of people who lived in different circumstances and had fundamentally different views of what is right or wrong is not a useful exercise.

I'm fond of the Old and New Testaments as cultural documents and great works of literature (there is a quote from a religious poem by an Anglican minister in my signature on top of that). However, we rarely see people argue we should use the Grecian model of heroism from the Iliad as a moral compass, even though Greek philosophy has had a major impact on the development of Western values.