"You don't need religion to have morals. If you can't determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion." – AthiestRepublic.com
This quite is just so full of conceit. Any atheist philosopher worth their salt knows and admits that nihilism defacto has to underlie their moral constructions (if they choose to create them for societal purposes) because they know that anything else is assumption and metaphysics. Atheist philosophers know that fundamentally morality is a belief and not a fact and that even biology itself goes against empathy, that evolution too goes against empathy. A serious atheist philosopher does not cower in shame and try to hold the banner of objectivity over this, as he knows for a fact that he would be being intellectually dishonest.
Internet and cultural atheists are entirely different to intellectually disciplined atheist philosophers.
At the same time, the moral highroad that is being asserted by the author of your quote, is in deep conflict with all of post-modern philosophy. Even 18th century philosophers like Kant, Hegel and even Locke would simply laugh at such an anti-intellectual statement such as "if you can't determine right and wrong, then you lack empathy", which asserts that right and wrong are universals that are just scientifically evident within the emotion of empathy, and we can all go home.
The entire history of philosophy and politics in the west since the 18th century has been a case of "look what we let out of the bag, now there's no stopping it". Empathy is for certain not a defining characteristic of morality, if anything it is shown through psychology and psychiatry to be a common trait among the things which cause societal transgressions (from homosexuality to rapists, murderers and pedophiles, the list goes on).
Empathy in it's relation to morality is a qualified element and not a distinguishing or objective scale which things are weighed upon.
At that, Empathy itself is a propaganda tool for which a person can be convinced of anything, this is evident in anything from the Stalinist propaganda to the Nazi propaganda. Empathy is what produces the change between passivity in something to action. Very uncoincidentally it was Empathy (like with the whole "peace and love" slogan and "love is love") which rhetorically was and still is used to push things like the LGBT, even though these statements are meaningless by themselves and push only to use a persons Empathy to ideologically side with something irrationally and illogically.
The person in your quote, just like most internet and cultural atheists are living embodiments of "
have their cake and eat it too". They do not live their claims or the conclusions of their assumptions, they hold a conceit to aspire towards the cultural morality of their time and space, which is a combination of post-Christian morality, liberal ethics (via Locke especially) usually and the appeal to popularity fallacy ("so and so is evil because it is culturally considered this, I won't speak against this because of the stigma placed on me - with the exception of LGBT").