The difference between religious morality and secular humanist morality

You have to ask clusium (resident Catholic)

Okay several things here:

1) When I say "bad person", I'm not talking about a person who is incapable of reasoning, or understanding the difference between right and wrong. An infant (or young child), or a mentally handicapped person who doesn't understand the consequences of their actions is someone I wouldn't describe as "bad". They are naive, helpless, ignorant, innocent, and in some cases "sick" or disabled. But not bad people. When I talk about someone as a bad person, I'm referring to someone who IS capable of reasoning, and chooses to act in the selfish way that is detrimental to well-being, as opposed to the selfless way that is beneficial to well-being. Someone who understands the difference between good and bad, and chooses bad (for their own selfish reasons). That is a bad person!

2) With that in mind, I don't care that a bad person sometimes does good things. Only when the good they do outweighs the bad can you describe them as a good person. But if they are a convicted rapist or murder who also happened to donate money to a children's hospital for cancer research, they're still a bad person! Because donating money to sick children doesn't reverse the harm you've cause in society by raping and murdering people. And most likely acts of goodness by bad people are self-serving methods of redemption from guilt, rather than true atonement. Turning yourself in as a murderer or rapist, and then paying restitution for the rest of your life to the families of your victims would be an act of atonement. But doing random acts of goodness to make yourself feel better about being a shitty example of a human being does not suddenly make you a good person (or even a neutral person). You're still a bad person, who just happens to do good things sometimes.

3) None of us are perfect and we all make mistakes. Human beings are animals which evolved from lower, social animals who were both predators and prey. We have have a complex social structure, are tribal by nature, are naturally drawn to people we perceive as "like us", and naturally fearful and/or aggressive towards people who we perceive as different from us. But, we also have larger brains, are capable of reasoning and learning from the mistakes made in history. We can understand complex facets of the human brain and the human condition by studying psychology, sociology, and philosophy. And having the ability to reason, weight the consequences of our actions, and recognize the value of a society that works towards well-being means that we have the ability to see the bigger picture, empathize with others, temper emotion with logic, and choose to act in the good way way most of the time. And I would describe most people as "basically good". That is to say that we are good people most of the time (or strive to do good rather than bad), and we happen to occasionally do bad things that we oftentimes later regret and try to atone for. In most people, the good outweighs the bad, and true acts of atonement can be accomplished.