Morality

Why is it that a priest is given more stature than anyone else. Why, when all they do is flog hate, irrationality and credulity. A person who travels across the globe to destroy a culture, a way of life, all to spread a fable (one of many, many, many, many, many fables...) that is inherently hate based. When I see a priest I do not give unchecked admiration. But our culture does, and it shows that although a strong majority are atheist, they, or we as a culture, still maintain a foundation on religion and mythological sotries to guide our lives. It is disturbing to realize this, really. How can grown, cognitively developed people maintain a glorious and blindly devoted belief in a fairy tale. If I suggested that the tooth fairy was a real entity that actually came to my pillow, or if my neightbour suggested that the boogie man attacked her and her pets last night (and the only way to satisfy the boogie man was to kill three virgins....that is why I did it officer) we would both be seen as (clinically) insane. Yet, because their tooth fairy or boogy man is dubbed god, jesus, holy spirit, whatever, it is allowed and promoted to be a sane belief. It blows my mind that people dont realize this, but I guess it lies in thei ability to have free thought. Science and nature promotes this, religion defies this. Here are some thoughts on morality, as it suggests one link these ideas.
It is well written that people inclined to pious ideologies confer upon themselves the foundation of morality - without god there is no morality, without an omnipotent creator to follow there is no need for social order.How is it, then, that it is actually religion itself that brings upon us immorality, and it is atheism that brings us to the highest order of morality? Morality in this case ceases to be a construct of anthropocentric designation and spreads to be a construct of nature - everything. For it is that 'everything' that evolved in a systematic ecological structure that today allows us, moral humans, to survive. Morality is not a construct of a religion, a religious person, a religious nation or a religious household. Morality is a direct consequence of understanding nature and understanding the natural place of humans, as one piece of a inexplicably complex Earthly system. This system, quite probably, is not confined to Earth at all, but is theoretically extant the universe(s?) over. The idea of multiverses thick with life, not our life or life as we understand it or as developed as we witness it, but life, chagrins the notion that we are either alone or special. Disquieting thoughts to theists and the blindly faithful. Lets move back and leave this point alone, for our tangent has taken us onto astrobiology and it was never intended to go this far. So, back to morality.Religions are bred to hate other religions - islamics hate, christians hate, catholics hate, ... hate - but atheism is never, repeat never, bred to hate. Quite the opposite. Incredulous people are never founded on hate of any other belief system, but forced to accept and enjoy them as theories. It is when these theories cause hate to spread, such as religions, and to cause murder, environmental rape and abuse, political corruption and myriad other ailments, that understanding atheists take a stand and say your wrong. Morality is founded on understanding how you can survive and how your group can survive, and said survival does not depend on how many times you pray to a wall (that presumably a mouse and a spider inhabit, and nothing else...) or how many times you give your money to a lying and culturally bastardizing priest. It beguiles me to understand how this can be thought of as important, let alone necessary, let alone the foundation of goodness. Morality is based on a ( I will say scientific, because it is the method of understanding our environment and the processes within) framework of intelligent understanding and witness to nature, all of nature, and understanding that we are nothing special. Nothing special. We are an animal, we evolved, we have genetic lineage companionship with other living species and we have simply (I am simplifying a great deal with this statement) evolved a trait that made us prosper and gave us selective advantages over other species at the time of our mutations and thus our development, our cognition, has enabled us to create a god, and to seemingly create morality. However, all animals have morality and although they are not aware of it, they are certainly enacting it. Look at a herd of anything. See how they interact - they have strict morals that enable their survival. There is no god telling them to be good. There is no god doing anything or meddling in their lives at all. Morality, then, is a construct of our cognitive development (development meaning change, not betterment, for it could be argued that our superior cognitive development will be - and is - our downfall in geological retrospect).
Morality is the antithesis of religion. The bible spreads hate for so many forms of people and animals, whereas any biologist, geologist, ...ist, or anyone well versed or well read or well experienced in nature and understanding of processes that enable nature to survive will have a higher degree of morality (true morality because pious people have certainly culled any recognition that their beliefs are not viable) than those who carry a leather-bound book around and try to destroy 'heathenistic' cultures and kill those who oppose their views.
When a scientists has a new idea, the old idea says "hmmmm...lets check this new idea out and see if we can learn something. When a religion has a new idea, the old religions says "kill".
I posit that while morality is a recognizable entity in human cultures, it is not prospered or founded in any way in religion, but quite the opposite. Atheists are truly more complex and moral individuals because they think, not blindly believe, and they choose their morality based on what they know to be correct, and not on what an outdated mythological text tells them to do.
Religion breeds not morality but rather immorality.