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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

You don't have to be peculiar to find God.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

To discover the true principles of Morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: They have need only of common sense.

Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.