Comment 6

The fact that an atheist can stand up and say that they abstain from stealing, killing etc because they worked out for themselves that it is wrong gives them, literally, the moral high ground.

Not really. The ability to "work it out for themselves" is an expression of what Christianity understands as the Natural Law, in other words people are endowed with the natural ability to arrive at the truth through their use of reason, as beings created in the image of God. Unaided reason can't always arrive at the full truth, but in principle the truth revealed by God (through the bible and the church) is the same as that arrived at by reason. Faith and reason, as the church has been saying for a long time, are not contradictory but complementary pathways leading to the truth.