Eh. Considering that Peter Singer has vocally advocated infanticide, I don’t think many Christians would consider him “good.”
BTW, I’m not necessarily impressed by someone giving to charity. While this is often a good thing, I would personally want to know which charities they’re supporting.
It’s just occurred to me that your friend should perhaps look outside her own borders: for example, a very high proportion of the UK population considers itself atheist, or at least doesn’t practice a religion, and I reckon there’s a similar proportion of goodness to badness in the UK as there is in the US. Of course, this isn’t really quantifiable, but you could look at the crime stats.
An atheist can be ethical and virtuous, but not (by some definitions of the word) moral. Morality pretty much means “duty to God.” An atheist, by definition, has no such duty. It doesn’t make him a bad person, though. A moral man does right by his God, and an ethical man does right by his fellow man. Both may behave identically in most important respects, but the difference is in motivation. Likewise, there are people who are moral without being particularly ethical.
(Note: Webster’s doesn’t distinguish between “moral” and “ethical”; the first I ever heard of a distinction between the two words was an interview I once read by Harlan Ellison, self-described as a humanist who’s very ethical but not moral at all.)
I looked up moral in Encarta and “duty to God” wasn’t in any of the seven definitions provided. In what major dicionaries is “duty to God” one of the primary definitions?
Ah please. All the fundies I know say the founding fathers were really born again christians, and thats an urban legend propagated by unbeleivers that they weren’t fundies, as it were.
I’m trying to help, but its hard to get through to some people.
I used to know a lady who boycotted Pepsi products becasue they advertised on Ally McBeal and that was an ungodly show!
I would forward Bill Gates, as he is quite the philanthropist, these days.
But there are also some who may call him the anti-christ, so its hard to know. 
I don’t suppose they’ve actually read anything by Thomas Jefferson have they? I guess this is something else I’ll be asking some former fundamentalist friends of mine about. They’re very good at explaining things in such a way that this poor 'Piscy can understand them.
Glutton for punishment that I am, I’ll give it another shot. Isaac Asimove wrote a two-volume guide to the Bible called, of course, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. In my opinion, it’s well written and appears to have good historical information. I’m not sure if it’s still in print, and I’ve only got volume two right now, but I’d strongly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the Bible. Isaac Asimov was an atheist who was from a family of Russian Jews. Then again, I get the impression fundies don’t think well of science fiction writers either.
Good luck!
CJ
Well, geez, how come athiest have to prove they’re not evil but Christians don’t have to go around proving they’re both Christian AND good.
Ask your friend to prove thieism automatically inculcates goodness.
vanilla, you should start your own branch of fundy-ism.
Albert Einstein
http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html
That’s a lie. Singer is a vegan/vegetarian (forgot which), and what you’re mentioning was a counterargument he made to people who claim that they can eat meat because the animals that are killed are so vastly inferior intellectually that it can’t be considered murder.
What he said was that newborn children have a mental capacity comparable to that of a grown-up cow. Therefore, people who eat meat for that reason should have no problem with eating infants either. His conclusion wasn’t OH HEY GUYS LET’S GO EAT SOME BABIES, it was that you shouldn’t eat meat.
For the record, I do eat meat, and I think his argument is pretty dumb, but saying that he advocates infanticide is just NOT TRUE.
Czarcasm, please reread the parenthetical at the end of my previous post; I put it there expressly for you.
Paine was a Deist, just in case you don’t know.
John Rabe, Hero of Nanjing. Completely unsure whether he is religious, however.
I printed out the first page and am sending it to her.
Thanks for the input.
You may have put it there for me(before I even posted a response. Amazing.) but it doesn’t explain where you got the definition of “moral” that you supplied. What dictionary gives a primary definition of either “moral” or “ethical” as “duty to God”?
Czarcasm,
As I explicitly stated, Merriam-Webster makes no distinction between “ethics” and “morals,” but I do, based on a 20+ year old magazine interview with Harlan Ellison. (I believe this was in The Comics Journal, issue 50, circa 1981, but I lost my copy long ago and the interview isn’t currently archived online.)
Synonyms often have nuanced distinctions that dictionaries miss (consider “arguable” and “debatable,” for instance). “Moral” and “ethical,” as I generally use the terms and see them used, have a difference of this sort.
Wouldn’t it then have been more accurate to say “My own personal definition of ‘moral’ is…”?
Czar, it isn’t an entirely new definition. The same distinction has been made on this board before. For a lot of people, some not religious themselves, the distinction between ethics, and morals is the that morals are attributed to conformity to the will of God. You may choose to ignore that ongoing growth of the language if you choose. Others will follow it.
“DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.” ~ Ambrose Bierce ~
This of course brings in the question, “Which god?”