@richardhutnik
"So again here, if Hitchens is correct in that, there is NO act anyone needs any God for to do, that is right, then exactly why do people fall short?"
... you have me completely baffled here.

The premise:
No good act can be exclusively performed by someone religious.

Your question:
Why aren't people always good?

I just don't follow... how does your question relate to the premise? Do you really think the premise is false?

Do you have university research journal access?   If so i suppose i can dig through it to find that particular article again.  Otherwise you are just going to be stuck behind a paywall anyway.

It's mostly all very bland consumer research for nonprofit organizations... that's been consistant... for pretty much forever.

To Paraphrase one of the most recent cases of research...

 They gave people 10 dollars.  Then either showed them a short video about nonsense, or a short video about starving kids in africa....

Then were told they give some of the money they had just received to charity to feed starving kids in africa.

In both cases religious people I want to say gave ~3.5 dollars.   While Atheists when shown the nonsense video gave ~.60 cents..  while when shown the video gave ~4 dollars.  (Numbers could be off, but the proportions are about the same.)

General conclusion being that people without a religious backing more often need to be hit with a sudden urge of intense compassion, while more religious people seem to give regardless, be it out of duty, having the thoughts of the unfortunate more on their minds, or just more "we're all in this together" cohesiveness.

Uhh..he is not saying atheists are perfectly moral, especially since such a state cannot be defined. He's not even saying they have the capability to be perfectly moral. He's saying they have equal capability to carry out moral actions compared to religious people.

So I'm not sure why you're asking why there is no perfect atheist. If atheists are equally as capable of moral behavior compared to religious people then we wouldn't expect atheists to be perfectly moral, because the group they are said to be equal to - religious people - aren't perfectly moral themselves.

"In a second experiment, 101 adults were shown either a neutral video or an emotional video about children in poverty. They were then given 10 fake dollars and told they could give as much as they liked to a stranger. Those who were less religious gave more when they saw the emotional video first."

Terrible study.

- Sample Size

- Fake dollars

Either way, study as-is shows that Atheists are governed by compassion as opposed to a mechanical response to charitable donations. 

There are also a few studies I have seen that include giving money to your church as charity, which it is not

While I agree that monotheistic religion specifically is and always has been bullshit. I must say, that the notion that "they would have more trouble justifying atrocities without the name of God behind them" is quite incorrect. There is a LOT of modern day evil, that has nothing at all to do with spiritual belief of any sort, shape or fashion. Real, tangible financial evil, perpetrated by many of the "power elite" and super rich, all in the name of saving a buck and making a profit. There are countries like China (and communist Russia in the past), for example, who committed great atrocities against their own people, but not in the name of religion (because they held religion as dangerous to "The State" and looked down upon it). While Iraq is a heavily Muslim country, Saddam Hussein himself was not a religious man, and perpetrated great evil against his own people, not in the name of Allah, but in the name of paranoid, greed, and love of power. Politicians on Capitol Hill right now, constantly making decisions most certainly not in the best interests of the American people, while many of them might hide behind a false pretense of being "religious" to appeal to dumb, ignorant rednecks, they are in fact making shitty decisions "for us" based not on what we the voters want or need, but what the super rich and lobbyists representing special interests (such as Wall Street, Big Oil, and the NRA, just as a few examples) want, all in the name of profit and making more and more and more money.

I would say the love of money and extreme greed and averice are the new cause of attrocity worldwide these days. Yes, there are millions of ignorant, frighteningly fanatical and ignorant as hell Christians in the world (mostly located in America), and yes there are millions of crazy Muslim fundamentalists out there too. Hell, even though it's a "no no" to bring up, you've also got the State of Israel, which while it holds many good people as CITIZENS, it also represents one of the worst examples of a theocratic government on Earth, which carries out injustices to it's own people, and has carried out or aided in atrocities from Palestine all the way to South Africa and beyond. And surely, all in the name of being "God's Chosen People", protecting the "Holy Land", blah blah blah.

BUT, while I would certainly never argue that these "One God, One Truth" religions HAVEN'T caused incredible and almost unimaginable harm over the last 2 millennia or so, I WILL argue the notion that an atheist would be "More Moral" than someone with spiritual beliefs. A lot of people, for one thing, seem to conveniently forget that there are a LOT of other types of spirituality out there in the world than merely Monotheism. And that the world is not a Black or White partition devided between those who believe in some monotheistic, dogmatic "God", or those who only believe in scientific study. There are PLENTY of other spiritula types who have nothing to do with "religion", per say. But beyond that, is the fact that, as already stated, I think the modern love of money alone proves to be more than enough to fuel not only man's inhumanity to man, but indeed, his ruthless and selfish destruction of entire other species of life, and the destruction of our own environment and planet. And while much of that is often supported by the "Christian Right", etc., they only do so because they're told to by those who love, not "God", but money and power, and get the ignorant believers to fall in line believing that whatever they're told "is what God wants", must be true. Religion is a big part of the problem, but it's not the ROOT of the problem. Not anymore.

I don't think Hitechens is suggesting that humans are innately moral, ethical beings.  We are capable of doing what is both right and wrong.  His point is that religion doesn't necessarily make one moral or ethical, people can be moral or ethical sans religion.

That being said, as a philosophy, I believe there are several good things to be learned from Christianity, as well as other religions.  Some of them, however were tenants of other religions before they were the tenants of Judaism or Christianity.  As an atheist myself, I strongly believe the point and purpose of religion was to explain phenomena and events that couldn't be explained. 

There are several aspects of Christianity that today we would find neither moral nor ethical.  Most Christian's just choose to ignore those parts.  The Bible is filled with some of the most absurd paradoxes, and sadly they were the best of the best Christian and Judaic works they could find to assemble into the Bible. 

It is only an issue of "forcing" someone to do it, if they don't want to do it.  And if someone doesn't want programs to help the poor, then I have to question them.  What I believe happens with government programs is they come to being because the will of the public is embarrassed by a problem, or offering it sounds appealing, and people fail to address the issue.  As a society becomes more secular, and people are taught to focus more on their own satisifation as their purpose in life, government programs will end up growing.  And in the charity side, particularly government programs, I get tired of the said "conservative" trope of how conservatives give more, thus it is better.

For myself, having people doing tithing to help the poor would help, along with some training and dealing with people's habits to make sure they learn to manage money better.   Need to work with the poor on this, and they need enough resources.  But, so long as the culture is one of self, self, self, then you aren't likely to get that.  Giving will be out of placating guilt.

What's new about that? It's a very, very old story.

But the saying that good people do good things and evil people do evil things, but for good people to do evil things takes religion... that rings true to me. I don't think it's limited to what we generally think of as "religion", of course. Many secular causes and movements have aspects of religion, chiefly that pressure to shut up and not think or ask questions and to generally do whatever the team demands of them. Communism has more blood on its hands than any other ideology and is virulently anti-religious, yet it behaves exactly like a religion. Psychologically, whether secular or not, it's all functionally the same: everyone who isn't in the group is, at best, dangerously misguided and, at worst, willfully evil.

Where I think Hitchens may have a point is that atheism negates one potential hazard, that of doing things just because "God said so". If the underlying reason that you do good things or refrain from doing evil ones is that you're afraid of what God might do to you if you don't, you're acting out of self-preservation and are not really a moral person. On the other hand, just as atheists are every bit as capable of moral behavior as the religious, they don't really seem any less given to extreme and irrational mass movements than do the religious; in fact, without a faith to focus their energy in less destructive directions, atheists who have a zealous personality type are pretty given to political extremism.

Societies have slavery historically, whether religious or not.  Atheism doesn't produce any moral change in society at all, because it is a negation of a belief, and negations are nothing, thus they don't provide any change.  Slavery even still exists in various forms, even right down to working for corporations where you have no right to intellectual property you create.  You get a wage and turn over property, and make a corporation rich.  There is also the reality of student loans where students can't declare bankruptcy.  There is also human trafficing that still goes on today.  In this, there is a VERY poor showing of examples of people who become atheistic being anyone different than they were before they were religious.  They are the same person.  They do what they do now, rationalized even stronger.  They remain who they are.   You even have the likes of Stalin, who fell out of the Christian religion and became a monster.   He no longer even had the commands of Jesus.

And that is a point here.  In DOING that which is moral and so on, exactly what leads to a genuine repentant experience to a position that is moral where someone does anything different?  The drive to convert to atheism is done on a personal level, so no outside anything makes a person do such.  In Hitchens, you end you seeing one person who did become a Socialist in his early years and then decided it was better to be a neocon and supported war.  You see little evidence of the poor.  Any semblance of a conversion experience isn't really notable.  AT MOST, you see the change being the person alone who shows some sign.  Their change really doesn't do much for others aroiund them.