One of the most lasting and powerful realizations of the Enlightenment was that an atheistic materialist could be just as moral a person as a believer, and maybe even more so. This insight in the West led to a tremendous liberation from ecclesiastical dogma and was crucial in forming that vital sense of individual liberty, which today we take for granted. It also might explain why for so many Western Buddhists the notion of karma as a nontheistic version of punishments and rewards is felt at a gut level to be an inadequate and unconvincing basis for ethical conduct.
~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism
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