Of morals and religions

The other night I was engaged in an animated and vivacious discussion with a few friends and one of them happened to make a claim that "all morals come from religion". Those may not be his exact words but the gist is somewhat accurate I assure you. It was an interesting observation and one I wholeheartedly support. Without any form of religious belief present in this world it would have taken us a long time for our moral ethos to evolve. Suspending all religious beliefs for a moment let us assume what would happen if we did not think stealing was wrong. Alternatively, we can envision what the world would be like if murder was considered alright. Or what about, adultery? Pretty chaotic.

Man would be very much lost and I seriosuly doubt that we would have come to the moral conduct as we know it today. Man by nature can not think on his own. He needs some sort of outside stimulus to jumpstart the thinking process. Science was started by looking at the stars during the early times. One may even say that science started with the advent of the fire. Scienctific discoveries were almost always by accident, only recently did scientists come to new theories with an end goal in mind but that has been possible only because of past discoveries! One may put forth the point of social sciences. Even in those cases we have needed an outside stimulus which is by more direct observation than experimentation. So too for morals, we have needed an outside stimulus and in this case it has been religion.

No one can deny then that religion is a fact and it exists. Everyone is however more than welcome to choose what they want for their religion, but to deny that it exists, is a very foolish thing in my opinion because those who deny it, live by its moral codes!