But the argument here isn't so much about whether we can "be good" with or without God but whether there is any such thing as "good" if each human gets to decide for themselves what IS good.
Yes, of course there is. Why would anyone think that this conflicts with each human getting to decide for himself what is good? What's the logic there? After all, each human gets to decide for himself whether there's man-made global warming. Each human gets to decide for himself whether the CIA assassinated Kennedy. Each human gets to decide for himself whether spending thousands of years selectively breeding corn for characteristics humans find desirable qualifies as genetically modifying an organism. Each of us having the ability to decide these things for ourselves does not conflict with there being such a thing as "the facts of the matter". This is such an ordinary and familiar part of life that we even have a whole English word, just to describe people who decide for themselves and who decide not in accordance with the facts of the matter. They're called "wrong".
Biblical theists think that God places a moral compass in our hearts - that we are created in His likeness - and even the atheist intuits the existence of a quasi-transcendent moral law.
You really shouldn't talk about what "the" atheist does, as though one of us can stand for all of us. We're all different people, thinking our own thoughts. Some atheists intuit the existence of a moral law and some don't.
Atheists are among the many supporters of same-sex 'marriage' for example.
Some of us are, some of us aren't. It's quite common for us to support it, of course, since there aren't any good arguments against it and since nearly all the bad arguments against it are transparent rationalizations from people whose real objection is obviously that they think their god doesn't like it -- a real objection obviously unlikely to impress atheists. Still, there are plenty of homophobic atheists against same-sex marriage. They got that way by osmosis, growing up in a culture that regrettably still has a lot of residual religion-based homophobia.
But those atheists' are simply wrong, and their opinion doesn't change the reality that same-sex marriage isn't immoral and a government shouldn't discriminate against somebody who wants to marry a woman merely because she's a woman too. That's sex discrimination. When a government discriminates against someone based on sex, it's treating him or her as a second-class citizen. Governments shouldn't be in the business of doing that. We're first-class citizens.
When asked why we ought to do something "good" rather than "evil" even the atheist has to wonder if "good" is merely a matter of personal opinion.
Again with the "the atheist". Some of us have to wonder about that and some of us don't. It's self-evident that "good" is not merely a matter of personal opinion. Regrettably, just because something is self-evident doesn't mean everybody can figure it out. Heck, King George couldn't even figure out we have the right to liberty. Some atheists aren't any smarter than King George.
Ask the atheist if there really is such a thing as inalienable human rights.
Yes. Duh.
(Primate rights, Mammalian rights, Reptilian rights, etc.)
Yes, them too.
And if such rights really so exist - who gave them to us?
Now that's a tricky question. It's easy and hard at the same time.
The easy part you surely already know. We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The hard part is, now that we know it was our Creator that gave us the rights, what created us? Back at the time people figured out we had unalienable rights, they didn't know what had created us. They had the most fanciful notions about it, mostly based on silly Bronze Age mythology. Can't really blame them for not being ahead of their time, of course -- discovering what created us was one of the hardest intellectual problems mankind ever tackled. It took another four-score and two years after that essay on unalienable rights before a couple of really smart guys did some really clever detective work and figured out we were created by Natural Selection. It's our Creator, so it gave us the rights.
(The odd thing is that the two guys IDed the culprit independently at about the same time, even though one of them was a pro who spent twenty years on the investigation and had all the advantages of seeing a great deal of the world and corresponding about it with the other leading scientists of his day, and the other guy was an amateur who started much later and put it together all on his own, in only a few years, after seeing little but England and Indonesia.)
No, of course not. That's what "inalienable" means.
Are they enforced by some Higher Power?
Nope. Enforcing rights is our job.
You guys are too punny
