Having said that I believe the US Army increased that percentage up to 50% by Vietnam and are currently running at a more respectable 95%. :)

Number one really should be did poorly in high school. I'm starting to see kids I knew last year join the military and it's very depressing but they're the same kids who drunk beer on weekends and slept through class.

That goes along with poor\unemployed.

Not doing well enough in school to not get into college and parents don't have the money to help you out.

If there was ever a bandwagon to jump on, it would be this one.

Amen.

That's not my argument at all though. My argument has nothing to do with how we obtain a "moral sense," but rather how we justify that moral sense. My argument is that without a principle higher than oneself, such as God, there is no way to ground moral principles. I don't think it's valid to take the higher principle as being societal values because an idea does not become more valid just because two people believe it instead of one. The validity of an idea has to come from within itself, and this is impossible if we simply create ideas for the sake of convenience.

Because of the society we live in, most people aren't driven to commit murder or other "evil" acts. Thus, saying that something is evil because most people aren't inclined to do it isn't enough. The problem is what can stop a person from murder once they find themselves in a situation that pushes them towards it? Because we find ourselves in a culture of moral relativism it becomes much easier to abandon morality once we find it's not the simplest way of dealing with a situation.

I did know what you meant, but the problem with your argument is that it assumes that a god (or a higher power) is the reason we think of certain things as being "wrong" rather than just not doing them to watch out for ourselves. As I said before, much of the morality taught in the Bible was taught long before Jesus' time, when gods that are now considered "mythology" were believed in. If those gods were completely man made, the moral sense was as well. Whether we had a moral sense and then decided to explain it with the idea of a god or gods is irrelevant to the argument. Of course we explained what we did not know with what we imagined to be the case, but it doesn't change anything here on Earth. Living happily ever after is plenty enough justification for human beings to be good.

You may not realize it, but your argument does lead to the idea that without a belief in god, people wouldn't have any conception of what's right and what's wrong. Unfortunately that is incorrect, and I'm living proof of that. The fact that my parents or their parents were brought up Christian or not doesn't matter - I don't have a belief in any higher power to help ground my moral principles, and I have as good or better a moral sense than your average theist.

People will always choose what's right and what's wrong based on the situation. The Bible says we shouldn't kill, but that rule seems to be pretty flexible. As I've probably posted before, this quote pretty accurately summarizes my idea of religion's role in society:
“With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
I think you're making the idea of human morality much too complicated. Don't assume that we need a higher power to justify being good - there's plenty of evidence to show that's not the case.

It's a perfectly logical assumption whether you choose to believe it not. It's a fact religion has shaped world history and our culture and it still does. Besides the bible/Christianity is no different from mythology (in the sense its a man-made religion to explain the unexplainable and everything in there is man-made) it's just managed to stay around longer and still managed to be relevant enough to where its followers can delude themselves into believing it's still incredibly relevant. I don't agree that without religion there's no sense of morality but you can't deny its importance to shaping Western ideologies or that it justifies many people values and morals. If you took it away (mostly in America where agnostics/atheists are a very very tiny minority) you'd strip away alot of "good" in followers because they'd lose their sense of purpose and incentive to do any good.

Lulz jack. Religion isn't evil, it's the human scum who throw their sense of reason in the trashbin and use their "faith" as a scapegoat when they explain why they commited atrocities and made dumbass choices that are the problem. I'm a non-denominational Christian, but that doesn't mean I'm being steered into evil action now does it? And lets not even mention the fact that people who jump on the "let's criticize religion!" bandwagon are, more often than not, unable to make a distinction between irrational obedience and having trust in something more than yourself to a logical degree, and yet continue to progagate worthless generalizations about ALL adherents to a specific mode of religious thought because its conveniant to do so.

When ****e happens, people are responsible for their actions. Regardless of what you see or hear or read, if you let something else determine what you do then you are simply making an excuse so you can commit the action in question. This doesn't just apply to religion, but to T.V., music, art, advertising, video games, etc. Men and women get themselves into messes because its easier to put their brains on cruise control and have someone else do the thinking for them (culture, friends, the media, your local pastor), because people on the whole are lazy and like to live life as if they're half awake.

Ultimately, blaming religion for stupid people doing stupid things is no different than blaming Toyota if you got in a car wreck due to your own crappy driving (or the other driver's driving). To say otherwise is making excuses for the weaklings who were tools to begin with.

Again, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that without God, there's nothing to stop you from dropping all your morals the moment they no longer agree with the situation. We live in a society where acting morally does benefit you the most. This is partly because we live in a society constructed around Judeo-Christian moral codes, which in turn depend largely on the Greeks. But if our society crumbled and all of a sudden money didn't mean anything and everyone had to physically compete for resources, how would you justify being good if it meant starving or being killed?

When has that ever not been the case? Followers of every major religion kill when they want to, and justify that killing with their religious book. If you think the belief in God overrides human nature, you're in for a surprise. What the belief in God does is it slows moral progress and often justifies evil in the society we live in today, where we don't need to physically compete for resources. How do you think societies formed in the first place? People agreed to give away total freedom for protected-but-limited freedom. The same would happen if this society was to break down. Again, God would be irrelevant to the way we'd act, we'd just expect rewards when it was all over.