Where does that gut feeling of right and wrong come from?
When someone who is raised in a family without God or religion then picks up the bible and reads things out of Leviticus or Deuteronomy (ie honor killings and the like) and then also reads about the Golden Rule in there as well, they are judging with their pre-established brain and sense of right and wrong as to whether to follow these "pearls of wisdom" or not. God is not needed for morals.
The gut feeling of right and wrong comes from our instinctual emotional response to minimize suffering, maximize happiness, and keep propogation foremost. Thanks to natural selection anyway. Notice that animals typically don't kill other animals of the same species but when they do (feuding ant colonies, lions eating cubs who joined a new pride, etc) it is usually justified as defense, territory claims, or some other necessary reason. Outside of that animals dont usually "murder" without cause. They must have learned it from the bible. If it's ingrained by God then God must have failed to ingrain it to an adequate degree in many mass murdering humans. Or as I like to believe, its murderers who lack something biologically to drive them to murder rather than not having been ingrained with enough empathy by God.
I like Terry's analogy on the island and using faith as a tool for survival and positivity and thats great. In some religions, faith can be used as a tool for positivity for many. However I don't see it being a necessary tool for survival. It has however been used as a tool for killing others. Yet the faith iself isn't to be judged as immoral, the action is to be judged as immoral. To label faith alone as immoral is like saying, "computer desk is immoral."
