RE: How Can Atheists Can Be Good Without God?

The other day my friend came up to me and said to me "you're an atheist aren't you? How can you be good without following God? He teaches right from wrong. Without religion you must have no moral compass". I feel that this question is asked way too often to atheists by those of religion and therefore I have chosen to address this question in this blog post. 

Last Saturday, as I was walking to my part time job at a pub, an elderly woman fell at the side of the street. Instinctively I rushed over to her and helped her up and made sure that she was okay. My point of this story- my act of altruism, was instinctive. 

Of course, religion may encourage morality but I really believe that people know what is right and what is wrong without religion. Since the time of philosophers such as Plato people have realised that morality does not come solely from religion. Plato questioned "do actions become moral simply because they are dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral?" Obviously the second option is the answer as if God commanded people to do something immoral it wouldn't automatically make the thing moral. This makes it clear that God cannot be the source of morality. 

When, in the bible, god made bears rip 42 children to pieces for making fun of the prophet Elisha, was he being moral? (2 Kings 2:23-24). Or in the New Testament when Jesus preaches things of questionable morality such as barring heaven to the wealthy and damning sinners to the torments of hell (Luke 12 and Mark 9).

Similarly there are sentiments like this in the Quran. 

Stoning and genocide are immoral, aren't they? So Christians and Jews often just stay quiet about those bits of the bible- Christians and Jews know that this is immoral because there is another source of morality other than the bible. This is my point. Religious people pick passages from scripture because of extrareligious notions of what is moral!  

Churches once defended slavery because of religious reasons. Now people are appalled by slavery. People did not change their view on slavering because god changed his. These changes came about from secular changes in morality. 

So we have deduced that morality does not come from god. Now I will address where morality actually does come from. I believe morality comes from reasoning and evolution. I will now explain what I mean by this:

Scientists have studied chimpanzees and have found traces of morality in them. Chimpanzees are our primate relatives based on the theory of evolution. Scientists have noted altruism, sympathy and sharing amongst chimps. So from evolution we have become moral.

Sweden and Denmark have many atheists and both places have great liberal social views, aid for the sick.

Evidently it is possible to be good without God.