Morals and Belief in God

A common - and deeply offensive - claim that many religious people make about atheists is that atheists have no morals because they don't believe in God. Besides being factually wrong - atheists do have morals - it makes no sense logically.

Assume that the religious people are correct and there really is a God that supplies us with a sense of morality. The only difference between atheists and the religious is that atheists don't believe there actually is a God. So, does God take away our sense of morality if we don't believe in God? If morals come from God, wouldn't atheists still have them, even if they didn't believe in the God that gave them morals? What kind of God takes away people's sense of right and wrong simply for not believing?

Assume that the religious people are wrong and there actually is no God and never has been all along. The religious still feel that they have morals and have had them all this time, even though there is no actual God giving the morals to them. So, wherever they get their sense of morality from, so do the atheists. If the act of believing in God is what gives them their morality, then they are claiming that active belief in an imaginary being is the source of morality, which seems to be a very strange source of morality.

So, whether God actually exists or not, atheists and religious believers get their morals from the same source - God or some naturally existing source of morality. It makes no sense that the act of believing would somehow cause a person to have morals and that not believing would somehow turn the morals off.

So, religious people who claim that atheists have no morals are claiming that their God takes away one's morality simply for not believing in that God. Or, they are claiming that the act of believing in an imaginary being is the source of their own morality. That says quite a lot more about their own morals than it does about atheists'.