I too am amazed that we are probably made of the same stuff stars are made of. Titles such as moral or immoral, religious or atheist bore me because they tend to prevent people from connecting. Thanks for listening. I have been wanting to provide balance on the airwaves and could not think of a better more timely manner. - Gabrielle Wilson, Host/Producer Summer Songs and Stories

After hearing about the Atheist Film Festival: I was reading, Genius, James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, and in discussing Feynman's rejection of religion, he writes: "He believed too, in an independence of moral belief from any particular theory of the machinery of the universe. An ethical system that depended on faith in a watchful or vengeful god was unnecessarily fragile, prone to collapse, when doubt began to undermine faith." I take this as trivially obvious myself, but I also heard on KPFA today a poll taken in Syria about morals which said that 90% of respondents thought that a moral position depends on a belief in god. Which I find not only idiotic but offensive in its ignorance. So it occurs to me that it is perfectly defensible, and probably right, that Feynman's position should be adopted by atheists in this form: "No morality, no respect for fellow living creatures, our planet or the cosmos can arise from religion. It is only atheists which are capable of a moral position because the religious are bound by merely gossamer threads to a theory of behavior which is superior to base, selfish instinct and those threads can be, and often are, torn away by the greed and interests of their holders, their manipulators." In other words, only atheists can be moral creatures. This is important to raise to counter the self serving claims of the religious.
Along these lines I am always impressed by the realization that we are star stuff - that our atoms were created in stars and strewn into space by supernovas. No concept in any religion comes anywhere close to the grandness and amazement of this knowledge. Religion is an impoverished, unimaginative way to view the world that should be discarded just because it is so ugly and so paltry.