This is a pretty good video IMO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7xt5LtgsxQ

For you, notascientist. I teach philosophy and that is a damn fine answer to the video.

His, the preacher in the video, argument completely bypasses the question of why an all-powerful and all-good god would allow evil to occur and instead tries to show that atheists lack any sort of foundational basis for morality. That is a fine debate tactic but it in no way helps the Christian deal with the problem of evil.

Unless the argument were then to go something like this: Christians get their morality from God who defines what is good and evil. This implies that God only allows good to occur and so we are wrong about is evil (and, thus, Christians should be willing to define all acts as good, even child molestation). Therefore there is no problem of evil as there is no evil.

That, of course, is not what almost any Christian would want to maintain and so they instead turn to 'evil exists for the greater good' or 'evil is the result of free will' but those are argument best dealt with in another lecture.

It's meaningless to hold God up as the pinnacle of a moral standard unless that standard is external to God, or else he can only be 'perfect' in way that's as arbitrary as anything a moral skeptic could come up with. At best, G is just better positioned to know what really is right and what really is wrong - and according to the bible, it's aok to fuck children (conditionally).

Re: Moral skepticism: I think there must be, as a logical necessity, morality (defining morality as 'that which is best or best-equal') - but we may never know what it is.

"that which is best or best-equal" might be something most people would like (but, I think you'd find surprisingly few), but it doesn't constitute morality in the sense of the word most people want. A person who simply doesn't care about what is best or best-equal won't be compelled by reasons predicated on it, but most people want morality to mean something compelling regardless of any feelings of the subject whatsoever.

Jesus has quite a few vague "Be excellent to one-another" teachings.

The church has done a great job of paying lip service to Jesus (particularly his horrible death) while ignoring most of his teachings in favor of the Old Testament's moral absolutist, God-is-pissed-at-everything model.

This in spite of the fact that one of Jesus' primary goals seems to have been to tell everyone that they were chucking the old testament playbook in favor of a sleek new compassion-based model. One way to interpret Christ's primary commandment is that you DON'T need God to determine right or wrong, because basic human decency TELLS you what is wrong: specifically, any action that knowingly causes harm to others.

Jesus seems to have a lot more faith in people than Old Testament God did. Good idea? Bad idea? That's for Jesus Court to decide.