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I'm convinced there has to be...
Excerpted from "Wishful Thinking" by Fredrick Buechner...
"Who needs a Divine Judge and Cosmic Law? We can learn to live in the lower case.
Except sometimes. Sometimes its' almost as hard to believe God doesn't exist as to believe he does. I don't mean a baby's smile....[or]... the beauty of nature. I mean an atheist is about as likely as anybody else to walk in to a newsstand someday and pick up a copy of National Enquirer or some such. On the front page is a picture of a dead child. The bare back is covered with welts. The eyes are swollen shut. Both arms are broken. The full story is on page 3 if you have the stomach for it.
To be consistent with his creed, an atheist can say no more than to beat a child to death is wrong with a small w. Wrong because it is cruel, ugly, inhumane, pointless, illegal and makes the gorge rise. But what is apt to rise with the gorge is the suspicion that it is wrong also with a capital W, the suspicion that the law that has been broken here is not just a human law, but a law as immutable as the law of gravity, one by which even if there were not children in the universe, and no men to beat them, it would be written in to the very fabric of reality itself that such as act is wrong."
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