Seems there has been talk about how atheists can not have moral conviction because they have no higher power to keep them honest and can't be trusted. This a list of some famous atheists who I think are as moral and good as anyone (on the surface anyway):
Famous Atheists
Who are some famous atheiests from years past? Read and find out!
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
-- James Madison (1751-1836)
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
"For myself, I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."
-- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them."
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards."
-- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
-- "Mark Twain" (1835-1910)
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
-- Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
"It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty."
-- H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."
-- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."
-- Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991)
This article is from:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art3701.asp
Mark