I came across couple audio tracks from Sam Harris on how Christian morality not only makes no sense, but can be regarded as positively despicable.

I realize that a large majority of the American population subscribes to this morality (and reflexively despises anyone who does not), and can only think that they have not completely thought this morality through, but just accepted it because everyone else in their community accepts it. This has to be a prime example of the way human intelligence of too often subsumed to groupthink and tribal identity. We could do so much better. (And we will, eventually. But it will take so much longer than it might.)

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/morality-and-the-christian-god

The text below is from the second reading “of a similar text”. This whole audio is about 6 minutes. Here’s just the opening, and the last bit. (Yes, his point here is about the ancient “problem of evil”, but there has never been a satisfactory answer to this question, to nonbelievers. Only to believers who seem to be able to explain anything away.)

It’s often argued that religion gives us the most secure foundation for morality, that without it questions of good and evil, right and wrong, simply cannot be answered. Or worse, without God such questions have no answers. But what can we make of this notion that God is the basis of morality, in a world in which 9 million children a year die before the age of 5. Most of this death and suffering has nothing to do with the choices people make for which they could conceivably be held responsible. You can’t say that these children were bad of their own free will, or that they got what they deserved. We’re talking about children dying before the age of 5. We’re talking about disease and unclean water and accidents and natural disasters—death by bad luck, essentially. There are some very unlucky people in this world, but according to a religion like Christianity, this is all part of God’s plan.

[He goes on about such needless deaths, vs the Christian idea that a serial killer can get into heaven by simply accepting Jesus in the last moments before his execution.]

One thing should be crystal clear to us at this point: this vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability. And notice the double standard that most believers use to exempt God from any accountability for this evil. We’re told that God is loving and kind and just and wholly good, but when someone points out the evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he imposes suffering on innocent people on a scope and scale that would embarrass the most vicious psychopath, we’re told that God’s will is a mystery. God cannot be judged by mere human standards, don’t you know? And yet these merely human standards are what believers use to judge God to be good in the first place.

[and skipping until the last minute or two]