From Jennifer F in her blog "Et Tu?" The diary of a former athiest in a post titled:

Good people, bad people, truth and lies

Meanwhile, in what I thought was a totally unrelated line of thinking, I continued to be baffled by the whole religion thing. Even if people did need to tell themselves stories about angels or an afterlife or whatever to make themselves feel better, why mess around with all the rules? Look at me, after all: I was a good person without buying into religious superstition with all its oppressive dogmas.

That last part was a fundamental part of my worldview: the idea that there were "good people" and "bad people," and that (whew!) I was one of the good people. Of course I knew that sometimes good people do bad things and vice versa, but I was confident that there was a certain level of evil that only a "bad person" could commit, that there was some invisible line that only someone fundamentally different from me could cross. When I would hear about heinous events on the news or read about the atrocities of history, I was hearing of acts committed by people who were entirely "other" -- they were the bad people, the people who did really evil things, and it would be impossible for good people like me and the nice folks I knew to understand the how's and why's behind their actions.

Probably one of the biggest paradigm shifts I've ever experienced in my life came after I started exploring Christianity and I realized: there is no such thing as "good people" and "bad people." Not in the way I thought of it, anyway.

As always, go read the whole thing. It's good.