...sinking to the level of our worst enemies. 

Thanks for the worthy diary, and I urge others to read it.

The blog you referred to had this to say:

"He wanted to be a good solider and yet on the other hand felt his duty to his God to be the greatest duty that he had," recalls Bill Wilder, director of educational ministries at the Center for Christian Study, Charlottesville, Va. "He said more than once to me that human beings are created in the image of God and as a result we owe them a certain amount of dignity."

I have heard the same sentiment expressed by others as they expressed support of, e.g., fair treatment for homosexuals.

As an agnostic, I have seen many very religious people who leaned on their religious belief and used it to act morally and with great love.  Two of my earliest supervisors were Mormon; they were exceptionally honest and one lost his job standing up to Ann Gorsuch during the first Reagan administration.  (He wouldn't lie about an environmental report.)  I was exceptionally lucky in my early years.  The first half dozen bosses I had were all like that; one agnostic, another Roman Catholic.

That said, I too believe that there are no necessary correlations between good acts and religion.  I'm gathering up some data from a professor named Marc Hauser at Harvard, and his book is on order.  Here's a quote from his observations:

He says the human sense of right and wrong, which evolved over millions of years, precedes our conscious judgments and emotions, providing a hidden engine of moral intuition that's shared by people around the world. "Our moral instincts are immune to the explicitly articulated commandments handed down by religions and governments," he writes.

Here's a key view of his:

For example, in a large sample of moral dilemmas that involve questions concerning the permissibility of harming other individuals, we have found no significant differences in the pattern of moral judgments between people who are religious and people who are atheists. Similarly, for a certain class of dilemmas we have found little effect of education. This is not to say that education and religion have no impact on our moral psychology. Rather, it is to say that certain aspects of our moral intuitions seem to be immune to such experience.

http://www.americans...

Here's an online "moral dilemma" test being used by some scientists studying ethics and the genesis of moral behavior:  http://moral.wjh.har...

Scientists are hard at work looking for explanations for our morality.  The next few hundred years of work in this area should be interesting.

but most of it has not seemed relevant to here.  If you go to http://teacherken.da... you will see that I have had a number of diaries that have had a fair amount of traffic, and as I do not do drive-by diarying, they have been somewhat time -consuming.  Actually, you may find several of them worth reading.  Lowell was kind enough to recommend several.

Right now I am finally getting to taxes, and working on several scholarly deliverables on which I am late, and catching up on reading I cannot do while school is in session, and a lot of school related tasks.

I do come and visit several times a day, even if I do not post all that often.

To me this makes absolute sense.  It seems silly to me to think that morality is only religion-based.  True, some religious tenets embrace moral tenets but there is no logic to say that the non-religious are therefore not moral. 

The evolutionary biologists and other scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of whether there is a physical basis for religion and morality.  One article discussing this was originally printed in the NYT a few weeks ago: "Darwin's God" by Robin Henig.  ftp://hogranch.com/p...  It's a long-winded essay, unfortunately, but eventually delivers the points.

One idea is that religion is a byproduct of our evolutionarily developed senses.  So those humans who survived were very good at detecting motion that might signify danger (was that a bear or a rock?)  The survivors were the ones better at this, and they were better off presuming the movement was dangerous.  Human beings have developed to the point that purely random movements in experiments have meaning ascribed to them.  If a subject is shown geometric shapes randomly drifting around, the subject will describe it as, e.g., "triangles chasing squares," or impute some causality.  Look at the work done by scientists searching for patterns and meaning in the infinite "pi" numbers. 

I think you see where this is heading. Why was the sun crossing the sky?  Oh, some guy with a chariot, maybe?  And why the famine?  Well, maybe the guy who drives the chariot is mad at us, just like our neighbor Ugg got mad at us yesterday for not giving him our daughter.  Hmmm.  Maybe if we give our daughter to the guy driving the chariot across the sky, the famine will end?  Ah, better idea.  We'll need the daughter to work in the fields and bear children.  How about we sacrifice a goat?  Hmmm.  And you know that odd farmer down the road who lives with another male farmer?  Maybe he's making the sun god mad.  I mean, since most of us live male with female, we can't be making the sun god mad.  It's got to be the few people doing things differently.

And on it goes.

Your posts are always so interesting.