Rant addendum

Bernd says:

Regarding the "in a society without god, everyone is his own god" problem, that's trivial:

It's the old religious argument (apart from, you know, god is just true) against atheism, that man without god would become arrogant, and would not accept higher authority beyond his own will, thus becoming evil against other men who have a different will:

It's been used against many free-thinking groups, and found different answers; if you consider that the biggest atheist movements of the 20th century have been the nazis and the communists, it's even hard to dismiss it out of hand.

I'll give Bernd the communists (gladly, in fact) but the nazis were not atheists for the most part. Various catholic and protestant groups (most notably, the "Deutschen Christen") openly supported them, and there never was a ban on religion in nazi-Germany (only on religion that didn't agree with them). The pope only condemned the nazis when the catholic church didn't get what had been promised to them.

Although it has only been a tangent of my rant, Bernd has some interesting thoughts on abortion, too. Makes me want to re-evaluate my stance on the issue which always has been something along the lines of "do as you wish as long as you leave me alone". Doesn't quite hold up, if one looks at it from a (bio)logical perspective.