Atheist moral code

[Alex K]

One key argument used by atheist to undermine religions is that many of them has books that clearly justifies rape, manslaughter and several other things that must be fundamentally evil.
In many cases this argument does not hit as hard as it should against individual believers, because they have found ways to interpret the scruptures so that these passages have other meanings, and the evil acts are not part of the individual belief.
When atheists attack these believers based on bad morals I sometimes feel like they are throwing dirt in their own eyes. Having no morals is not necessarily better then having bad morals. As far as I understand, atheism is based on a disbelief of gods, which don't automatically point in the direction of a moral code.
So, I'm wondering if there is some kind of moral code that all atheists would be bound by, which could justify these arguments. And if there is, where is it derived from?

Do I understand you correctly - you mean to say that atheists can't really accuse the religious of having bad morals because they themselves do not possess a common and unified moral code? That to me is several misunderstandings at once.

First of all, atheism by itself simply doesn't provide a moral rule book. You're asking too much of it. Atheists obviously don't share the same moral code because atheism itself doesn't prescribe one. That doesn't mean that individual atheists don't mostly have one, that's a ridiculous assertion.

Second, the real argument goes like this: religion comes with a terrible moral code. Being an atheist doesn't specify which moral code you follow, but at least, in contrast to many religions, it's not a hindrance! And that's all there is to it.

To exaggerate a bit, what you do is kind of along the lines of "ok, non-massmurderers don't share all the same moral code. So how can they possibly criticize the mass murderers?