Recent articles about atheism

I recently read two interesting articles about atheism. The Globe has a bit about Daniel Dennett who found that members of the clergy don't necessarily believe what they're preaching. I had wondered about that.

That’s the joke that we often provoke from people when we talk about this: Anybody who goes through seminary and comes out believing in God hasn’t been paying attention.

The other article was in the Opinionator at the NYTimes and was about the supposed challenge of having morals without God. He says

While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

Really? This argument seems entirely specious to me: maybe the reason that such cultures do not exist is that the religious cultures have killed them off. I agree that we don't know what morality looks like without religion -- but we can see what it looks like with religion. It looks like crusades and inquisitions. What might it look like without the millstone of religion dragging it down. That's what I'd like to know.