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Faith still shapes morals and values even after people are 'done' with religion

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By Philip Schwadel and Sam Hardy

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You do not need to be religious to know right from wrong. And what about all these hate groups who use religion as an excuse for their hate?

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Their study points to the idea that there are shared human values that transcend religion and are most often co-opted by religions and claimed as somehow uniquely theirs.

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Religion also has a lot of baggage. It's basically one big cult.

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 If there is no God, there is no such thing as true right and wrong. 

Yet other studies on moral attitudes show the same pattern of judging right and wrong across people of all religions and cultures. This study seems slightly at odds with that.

For me, the classic is the parable of the good Samaritan. It didn't teach morality, it took it for granted that people knew what was right and wrong. (Jesus's question, "Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?") Other religious texts have similar parts where it is assumed people already know what is right. Ask anyone whether it is right or wrong to help someone in need and I think you will get a similar answer everywhere.

But justifying questionable actions (e.g. burning witches, or testing someone's faith by telling him to sacrifice his child) tends to involve a lot of text searching and twisted logic.

So I'd say morality is human, but belief in god can justify the immoral.

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If there is no God, there is no such thing as true right and wrong

Since God was created in Man’s own image, and by Man, any and all religious teachings and ideas of right and wrong were also created by Man.

Finny how the article takes religion in America to illustrate the idea that the religious have morality. It’s the various religious cults that discriminate against people who are different, who see no problem in sick people being refused medical care, who consider gun ownership to be a God-given right regardless of how many mass shootings take place in schools and shopping malls, who chant ‘God bless Amerrka’ as the US military and/or US arms wreak havoc in foreign lands and kill foreign babies.

People don’t need an imaginary despot in the sky to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s simple- just Do As You Would Be Done By.

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There aint no God. No Heaven. Nohelll. We need to get over this indoctrination since birth. For Heavens sake (Opps). Believe in SCIENCE and we might work out a universal set of values to live in peace, and leave each other alone. SCIENCE ROCKS.

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It is hardly surprising that several of the personal beliefs related to religious systems are distributed in an spectrum instead of a simple yes/no distribution, nor that these beliefs decay over time or that are less likely to be maintained after leaving less strict forms of cult when compared with more demanding systems.

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the five moral foundations commonly examined by psychologists: care/harm, fairness/cheating, ingroup loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation

Personally, I'd only see the first two of those as markers of morality.

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It's interesting that atheists are concerned with morality because there is no such thing really, if there is no God. If there is no God, there is no such thing as true right and wrong. There might be general ideas in different cultures about what is acceptable and what is not, but nothing is truly wrong in an objective sense of the word because there is no absolute standard or right and wrong. It's all made up by humans. If we all make up our own standards, why in the world do we have to follow them? We don't and often times we even compromise and break our own standards because we know or think that it doesn't matter - that we are not accountable for our actions - outside of the law of the land. People tell us that bullying is wrong, but if it's not against the law, how can anyone say that it's wrong? It might be their personal view that it is "wrong" or "not good", but so what? Cheating on your wife? Why is that wrong? Isn't it funny that we call it cheating? Kind of shows that we know in our hearts that it is wrong, but why do we feel that it's wrong - if there is no such thing as right and wrong? So either there is real right and wrong(which we all know to be true deep down in our hearts) which points to the existence of God, or anything goes as long as it is not against the law. And even then, it doesn't matter as long as we don't get caught. After all, we don't need to give account of our actions to anyone! We are totally free! (Which makes life totally meaningless, but that's a whole other topic.)

We all look at morality in a very biased manner - wanting to justify the things we want to do, and wanting to vilify the things we don't agree with - things we don't want people to do to us. Can we trust ourselves to really be good judges of what is right and wrong when our hearts are so biased? If we want to, we can almost justify ANYTHING! It's quite convenient to be free from God's law. It allows us to live our lives however we want to. No wonder so many people choose to ignore His existence and live their (sex) lives however they want to. No bias there, right?

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Another way to read the results - rather than calling persons who left religions as "religious drones" (which sounds insulting) - is to see that many have replaced their traditional religions with some other noble cause or belief system that provides them similar structure that they used to have in their initial religion. This can range from a local cause to a global one (saving the planet from climate change, for example). As a devotee in their new cause, they exhibit the same symptoms and experience the same connections that their former religions provided them - a sense of meaning and purpose, identification of who is "good" and who is "bad", and activities that fill their time. If you don't believe in something, then you'll wind up believing anything.

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