I have to agree that you don't have to have religion or God to have morals. There are good and bad people in this world and the good people aren't all religious people. People know early on what is right and what is wrong. They choose to live the way that they want to. Even if you were never taught right from wrong it is just something that you know. I know lots of good living people with high morals but they have never been to church a day in their life.
It should be noted that defining morality with God is no slam-dunk. First you have to decide which God to follow because there are so many to choose from. Even the God of Abraham, who has pretty much cornered the market of modern theology, comes in three major versions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) and countless minor ones. The putative Word of God includes such guidance as: When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them... (The Q'uran, sura 47:4) and Put away your sword, for those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. (Matthew 26:52) So which is it? How can we decide which version of God's Word to follow without some standard that transcends God? The question of whether God sets the moral standard or follows a moral standard was first raised by Socrates in 380BC. The dilemma can be summed up thusly: if God says what he says because He is moral then morality transcends God. On the other hand, if what is moral is defined by the Word of God, then in what sense can morality thus defined be considered "good"? Is it moral to kill unbelievers because Allah says so? What if God said it was OK to kill innocent children? Would that in fact make it moral? (And if your response is: God would never say that, then my response is: 1) he already has said it on a number of occasions, and 2) who are you, mere mortal, to say what God would and would not say? Even putting aside the metaphysical question of the moral status of God, there are practical issues involved with how to interpret God's word. For example, Leviticus 24:16 says, "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death..." Does that mean we should institute the death penalty for blasphemy? Or take the second commandment. This is commonly taken as a prohibition against idol worship (though the sight of Catholics bowing down before statues of saints really makes me wonder sometimes) but the actual text says, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth." Does that mean that photographs, statues, and portraits are immoral? Muslims think so. How do we decide? These kinds of conundrums are legion, and have kept theologians occupied for millennia. To these questions I would add one more: why aren't all the atheists raping and pillaging? In Norway, for example, the overwhelming majority of the population is non-religious, and yet you do not see uncontrolled outbreaks of selfish behavior. To the contrary, Norway is socialist, and has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. Sweden and Japan are similar. By way of contrast, the United States, with one of the highest concentrations of avowed Christians in the world, has one of the highest rates of violent crime, and is notorious for its ever-increasing socio-economic disparities.
I believe that even if there was no notion of a god or higher being watching over us these sorts of morals would still be the same. As you say, morality can still exist without the idea that some flying super being is our overlord, but the idea of a heaven is an enticement for people to follow the rules a lot more.
As the previous poster says; 'which God does someone follow?' because each religion has it's own code of ethics and morality. I have met some people and have some friends who go to church and say and believe they are religious, yet some of their morals are questionable as in lying and deceiving people deliberately. They then go to church to ask fro forgiveness, but then carry on doing the same. They think if they ask for forgiveness, it's okay to do immoral things. Logic says, just stop doing immoral things and you don't need to ask for forgiveness, because if you ask for forgiveness, you actually know you have done wrong.
Theres is Sunday or Saturday piety. Most of the people I know pretend to be really good people on the day they go to church and only when they are in church but once they are out they stop pretending and become what they truly are. Bad people. I believe that people fail to grasp the basics of religion. It's all about love. Love. The preachers should teach love. If people can learn to love each other then we wouldn't have a need for laws, moral codes, etc because everyone would all abide by the golden rule [do unto others what you expect them to do unto you]
We don't have morality without God, period. People always say they don't need God to do good works. Well actually they do. Because God wrote morals onto our very hearts and consciences. Where does your conscience come from? God! So yes you do need God to be able to do good. It's just that a lot of people refuse their conscience and sear it so they don't feel bad about certain things. What people are really saying is "I don't need a relationship with God to do good." None is good, no not one. We are all sinful. But God gave us consciences to know right from wrong. It didn't just evolve, and people know that. They just suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
If you need a god to have morals then you are very weak minded in my opinion. Non believers believe that a god is a a kind of threat system. "believe in me or you go to hell." Believers believe that he is something to aspire to. "I want to be good here so I can have everlasting peace with Him", and these are the two opposites by which many people base or justify the morals on.
If you think about it, most the morals (legal ones) are based on the 10 Commandments, so even if you aren't religious or believe in God, these laws have come around because of them. In particular, murder, theft and lie. These have developed in to laws, to prevent people from carrying them out with punishments, so they are morals with a deterrent too. Morals also come from people and their own standards. People now decide how great a lie is and whether it was acceptable, so moral standards vary. To me, a lie is a lie. although some people are blinkered and can't see the truth and see what they want to see.
So by that very definition all the bad stuff must come from God too, since he created us and your minds and consciousnes? So all the murders, raping of children, genocides... all that comes from your God too? edit: I'm just curious to see how this works from a religious person's point of view.
I grew up in a Black, working-class neighborhood down in Virginia. My mother had already stopped going to church, so my relationship to religion was already non-existent. Even back then I noticed the irony in that many of the people that went to church regularly, and professed love for the Lord, were some of the most dishonest, rude, and profane people around when it wasn't Sunday. Meanwhile my mother and myself, while living a far from perfect life, had no issues in figuring out right from wrong, and in treating others with respect. TL;DR: I learned as a child that religious devotion and moral superiority rarely go hand in hand. And I haven't looked back.
