Her comment implies that the only possible reason I might have for not accepting Christian beliefs is ignorance of Christian beliefs. It also shows her ignorance of the fact that many Atheists started out as Christians.

A September 28, 2010 article in the New York Times, by Laurie Goodstein, reported that “the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked 3,412 Americans 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, and religious history and geography. The survey found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons knew the most.” The average number of correct answers, out of 32, was: Atheist/agnostic 20.9, Jewish 20.5, Mormon 20.3, White evangelical Protestant 17.6, White Catholic 16.0, White mainline Protestant 15.8, Nothing in particular 15.2, Black Protestant 13.4, and Hispanic Catholic 11.6. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html?ref=laurie_goodstein

Atheists’ high score is not surprising. Many began their journey to Atheism with a cover-to-cover reading of the Holy Bible, and/or spent years reading philosophy to piece together their own philosophy -- like learning to cook and then preparing one’s own meals rather than just accepting whatever someone else serves up.

As for myself, I am hardly ignorant of Christian beliefs. My parents took me to services and sent me to Sunday school in a Methodist church about four miles south of where the woman insulted me. I learned the stories, but I expected the story tellers to back them up with some credible, objective evidence. Instead, they said, “trust in the word of God.” Since “God” never personally vouched for the stories being told in “His” name, and the story tellers never produced any credible, objective evidence that “God” approved the stories, all I had was the story tellers’ own word for it that they spoke for “God.”

I knew that other churches, temples, and synagogues told their members stories which were supposedly “the word of God.” I also knew that those stories conflicted with what I was being told. Christians say that Jesus Christ is the “son of God” and “mankind’s savior.” Jews do not accept Christ as divine or as a savior. Roman Catholics say that the Pope is “God’s” representative on Earth. Protestants dispute that. Each claims to be telling THE one and only Truth, but I saw that their “truths” disagreed on some very basic points.

I spent a couple of years gnawing on the question of how to tell which of them had got it right, until I spotted the fallacy in that question: it assumed that one of them had to be right. Once I recognized the possibility that they could all be wrong, I found some peace of mind -- at least on that subject.

Of course, there were still things to wonder about. If gods are imaginary, what are the real sources of the things that theists say gods have done? The Big Three questions in my mind concerned existence, life and morality.
Public school science classes gave me a starting point for following my own curiosity. I learned how natural selection applies evolutionary pressure to living things. I read about how the Miller-Urey experiment created amino acids using natural chemical processes. I read that supernova explosions produce all of the naturally-occurring elements heavier than hydrogen and helium -- including the elements necessary for life -- and spread them through space to be incorporated into stars and planets.

Onward from the Big Bang, purely natural processes can explain existence and life. I’ve read some interesting ideas about natural processes that might explain the Big Bang, too.
Morality was a different can of worms. School literature classes presented works that had moral messages, but most only described how societies or people had dealt with various challenges. That didn’t teach us how to think about why certain behaviors are considered moral, while others are considered immoral, or where our concepts of morality came from.

As with the questions of existence and life, I pursued my own curiosity about morality, but laying the philosophical groundwork lasted well into my adult years. When I managed to extract the essentials from the noise, I understood why -- most moral codes, such as the Ten Commandments, are presented as monoliths, when in fact, they are most often a patchwork of basic morality and cultural morality.
Yes, I deduced that there are two distinct kinds of morality: basic and cultural. Basic morality is about preventing the kind of interpersonal violence and dishonesty that universally destroys the trust needed for group living. Cultural morality is about tribal identity customs.

Basic morality is Darwinian: humans survive best when we live in groups. Group living requires trust, so a tribe whose members indulged in violence or dishonesty toward each other would most likely disperse, losing the ability to defend themselves. Tribes whose members refrained from violence or dishonesty toward each other would have had a much better chance to prosper. That dynamic is basic to any co-operative, social species. Even chimpanzees and wolves generally refrain from killing their tribe/pack-mates.

Cultural morality is about what worship, sexual and reproductive practices one must or must not engage in, what items of clothing or jewelry one must or must not wear (kilt, anyone?), what foods one must or must not eat, etc. Darwinian processes make no judgment about most tribal customs. It matters not whether one’s nutrition comes from kosher or non-kosher items, beef or fish eaten on Friday, and so on. As long as one’s body gets sufficient nutrition, one will have a chance to prosper and reproduce.

The most likely reason for scrambling basic and cultural moral rules together in moral codes like the Ten Commandments is tribal leaders’ hope that their people would give the arbitrary and questionable rules of cultural morality the same respect commanded by the undeniable rightness of Darwinian basic morality.

Many people apparently do see a scrambled-together basic-plus-cultural moral rule set, like the Ten Commandments, as indivisible. To them, rejecting one rule is the same as rejecting all of the rules. They seem to believe that anyone who violates their cultural moral rules must be suspected of also being capable of violating basic moral rules. That probably explains why some people think it unwise to trust anyone who does not follow their own tribal customs and cultural morality, and why some people may even feel that “outsiders” are fair game for treatment that violates basic morality. It reflects a primitive, paranoid tribal concept of humanity. Everyone is an “outsider” to someone else’s tribe and culture.

Paranoid tribalism may have helped strengthen internal tribal bonds, back when humans lived in small, well-separated tribes, but these days, most Americans live in metropolitan areas too crowded to offer the luxury of separating from “foreign” cultures. If we are to minimize conflicts, we must accept as equals people who practice vastly different cultural customs, some of which violate cherished cultural norms. The difficulty of such acceptance is reflected in America’s intractable polarization over sexual mores.

That is what separation of government and religion is all about -- maintaining civil peace despite cultural/religious differences. Government must concern itself only with the things we all recognize as needs: basic morality and human cooperation and sustenance. Attempts to impose culture and belief only cause offense, resistance and conflict.

Finding eye-opening enlightenment takes far more than just sitting in a church pew. The Founding Fathers’ wisdom in separating church and state was obtained at the expense of Europe’s wars over religion. In supporting secular government by attempting to explain the difference between basic and cultural morality, I hope that I have, in some small measure, followed in their footsteps.