Infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer recognized this as a teen, as he asked his parents rhetorically, “If there’s no God, why can’t I just make up my own rules?” The fact is that just as we wouldn’t consider vanilla ice cream “wrong” or “evil” simply because we learned that 90 percent of the world didn’t like it, it makes no sense to thus label murder if the only reason we do so is that most of us prefer that people not kill others in a way we fancy is unjust. If there is no God, “morality” is just values and values are just taste. And when Hitchens axiomatically accepted his morality as something more, it implied God’s existence. Only, while Dahmer figured this out, Hitchens never did.
Actually, God is used to justify making up your own rules (e.g. “God says Kill The Infidels!”) far more often than atheism is.
But I am not convinced that if a belief is useful, it must therefore be true.
Do you think, were it not for fear of eternal damnation, you would be a homosexual murderer?