Hmm. I would say that empathy is about putting friends and family and strangers with equal kindness...

They call "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" as the golden rule because a version of that concept appears in virtually every major religion and/or ancient philosophy... and you dont' have to believe in any god to follow it.

I have often seen well-placed criticism from atheists towards the people that say "I call the universe god" or something similar. They don't believe in god the way christians do, but they want to hold on to the idea of god and have something else to apply that label to, so they say "god is the universe."

An important thing to understand about this, that many atheists understand but some do not, is that there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect definition, so they are not wrong to call the universe god. But the term god carries a lot of baggage that can bring assumptions and/or confusion when used to refer to the universe.

It seems to me there is another instance, coming from atheists, of the practice of using a term with a lot of baggage to talk about a concept that hasn't been connected to that baggage. The example I'm thinking of is using the term morality to talk about the wellbeing and caring of people with empathy.

I am very interested in helping people and I think empathy is very valuable, but, to me, it doesn't seem like a good idea to use the word morality to talk about that.

I think it's better to dismiss morality as a silly thing that irrational people talk about, and instead care about helping people and having empathy.

The same way that people are irrationally trying to hold on to god and looking for something else to call god, people are irrationally trying to hold on to morality and looking for something else to apply that word to.

The "You (atheist) can't be moral without god" is one of my favorite theist argument as I can bring up a long list of (god wills it so it is moral) examples of moral biblical atrocities.

No shit, Sherlock?