gods-advocate:

“I now maintain nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no morality…”

— Joel Mark, atheist philosopher

And this is why I’m “preying on [your] blog.”  People like you put up quotes like this to misrepresent atheists and to mislead others regarding who we truly are.  Don’t act as if you didn’t post this quote to “prove” your conclusion:  atheists are either immoral or amoral.  Not all atheists are moral nihilists.  Mark’s position is exactly that.  Stop quote mining and post the entire quote in context because I’m sure that “…” probably leads to a broader explanation of what he’s trying to say.  Let’s read his words in context:

A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

Joel Marks (2010. An Amoral Manifesto (Part I))

He’s simply explaining his acceptance of hard determinism, which leads to an acceptance of moral nihilism.  He’s not implying that all atheists share his stance and he’s not implying that he’s going to rape or murder someone.  Half-baked quotes like that are dishonest and agenda-driven.  It’s exactly what creationists do when they think that an evolutionary biologist, a geneticist, a paleontologist or an anthropologist agrees with them.  It’s called quote mining and it’s one of the worst forms of intellectual dishonesty; moreover, it’s an underhanded way of misrepresenting the actual views conveyed in a given quote.