A Bit on Third Base Moralists — a/k/a Atheists…
You ever watch a fish brag about how well it breathes air?
That’s what it’s like watching atheists lecture us religious types in Western civilization about morality.
So Ben Shapiro goes on Real Time with Bill Maher — and it’s one of those rare cosmic moments when reason walks politely into the lion’s den. Maher, bless his smug little heart, tells Shapiro the Bible is “full of wickedness and nonsense.” Classic. The man who built his entire brand on “I’m not religious but I’m totally moral” strikes again. Maher basically thinks his conscience came pre-installed, like a Tesla autopilot for ethics. And, to top it off, he cites the Enlightenment as some manner of “Great Leap Forward” for humanity—minus the guillotines I’m sure…
And then Shapiro drops a truth bomb that detonates across every atheist subreddit like the Big Bang they worship:
You and I agree on morality about 87.5 percent because we both grew up in a Western civilization shaped by the Bible. You were born morally on third base.
Translation: Bill, you didn’t invent morality. You inherited it. You’re cashing the check that Catholicism wrote while pretending you’re the self-made moral billionaire of Beverly Hills.
Moral Orphans of Western Civilization
Let’s face it — modern atheists are like rebellious teenagers living in Dad’s house, eating Dad’s food, using Dad’s Wi-Fi, but yelling, “You don’t exist!” from the basement.
They enjoy a world shaped by Christianity — dignity, compassion, forgiveness, the concept that human beings have intrinsic worth — and then they hold a TED Talk explaining how empathy evolved from monkey grooming. “See? We don’t need God. We have serotonin.”
Sure, Chad. Without Christianity you’d still be tossing virgins into volcanoes and calling it a wellness retreat.
These self-proclaimed “enlightened” secularists talk about justice, rights, and equality as if those ideas popped out of nowhere — like the universe, I guess. But here’s the punchline: the only reason they believe in human rights at all is because Catholicism taught them that man is made in the image of God. Otherwise it’s just Darwin’s Thunderdome out here, and the only right you have is the right to be lunch.
Cut the Root, Kill the Flower
Shapiro used a perfect metaphor that he cites often. Our moral culture is a beautiful flower rooted in Biblical soil. You can cut it, put it in a vase, and it’ll look nice for a while — but eventually, it dies.
Western civilization today is becoming a wilting bouquet on the coffee table. We keep spraying the flowers with water fertilized with “social justice”, “climate justice,” “racial justice” “economic justice”, and sprinkles of other “leftism” pretending the flowers are alive. Meanwhile, the roots of faith rot in the compost heap behind the university gender-studies department.
Without God, “good” and “evil” become atomized individual preferences. You might think killing the innocent is bad; while the guy next to you thinks killing people means it’s Tuesday. And since there’s no divine law, who’s to say it isn’t Tuesday? The only authority left is whoever can shout the loudest on X (formerly Twitter — formerly civilization).
Atheism: The Great Free-Rider Program
Atheism in the West is the world’s greatest moral welfare program.
It collects all its moral benefits from two thousand years of Catholicism but it pays nothing into the system.
You don’t get to claim “love thy neighbor” came from natural selection or the Enlightenment. Evolution says “survival of the fittest,” not “let’s build St. Jude’s Hospital.”
The atheist moral code is like a vegan at Texas Roadhouse — happily enjoying the bread that Catholicism baked, but they’re offended by the cow that died to make it possible.
They want the products of religious philosophy — dignity, law, equality, reason — without religion or the ends of religigon itself. It’s like ordering a bacon cheeseburger and insisting it’s cruelty-free.
Bill Maher and the Illusion of the Self-Made Saint
Maher’s the perfect mascot for secular morality. He mocks and sneers at religion while enjoying every moral luxury it built — courts, hospitals, the idea that women aren’t property, you know, basic civilization.
He’s a guy living in a mansion saying, “I don’t believe in architecture.”
Okay, Bill. But you’re still inside the house.
He insists he’s moral without the Bible — but only because he was raised in a society absolutely marinated in the Bible. He can afford to be atheist the same way a trust-fund kid like Zohran Mamdani can afford to be a socialist.
Reality Check: Morality Doesn’t Evolve, It’s Revealed
The Catholic Church, of course, has been saying this for two millennia. Morality isn’t a social contract — it’s an objective order grounded in God Himself. Remove God and you don’t just lose rules — you lose reasons for the rules.
If morality is just a human invention, then it changes with the next Netflix special. You can’t build an eternal code on shifting opinions. The Ten Commandments aren’t suggestions we outgrew — they’re the manual for how reality works.
Natural law is not optional. It’s gravity for the soul. You can deny it, but you’ll still fall.
The Finale
Atheists are free to reject God — that’s the deal. But let’s not pretend their moral compass wasn’t assembled by a few thousand years of Catholicism—even Ben Shapiro—an Orthodox practitioner of Judaism conceded this point. Atheists didn’t discover it; they downloaded it and discarded the personal obligations that come with it.
So yes, Ben’s right: atheists are born morally on third base.
But since their precious Enlightenment, they’ve been trying to steal home by declaring “God is dead.”
The problem is, without God, there’s no home plate and no baseball. There’s just an empty field and a lot of people running in circles, playing Calvinball.