This is something that has been written about a lot, and I know there are studies about this but I want to look at it from my point of view. People think you get your morals and your values from religion. This confuses me. Mainly because of my boyfriend.
My boyfriend is an atheist. He has never been arrested, was never suspended in school, never had a detention, never even skipped. He doesn't smoke, he barely drinks, has never gotten high. He has a good job, he's graduating college, owns his own car. He is such a good guy and has never believed in god a far as I know. Why is he so good?
Now someone might say "Well maybe his parents are religious so they passed on their morals to him." As far as I am aware, on his fathers side atheism goes back to his grandfather. His mother is also nonreligious. I just don't get it. People are so weird.
People seem to conflate religious culture with the larger secular culture in which it operates. Although they influence each other, they're definitely different things. People pick up the standards of the culture they live in whether religion is involved or not. Also, two parts of current evolutionary theory which have been observed in a variety of non-human and even non-animal species, predict behavior that we would recognize as some form of morality even without culture there at all to teach us particular values. Kin selection says we should have a natural revulsion to harming anyone we identify as family members because it harms the chances of our own DNA being passed on, and reciprocal altruism says we are more likely to do favors for others if they do favors for us, too. If we recognize our larger community as family even when they're not related to us, we hold ourselves to a standard of behavior toward them without even trying or thinking about it. Hence a morality that appears to have come from some outside source because we can't explain it, but which actually is just a natural part of what we are.
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