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religion is essential to a moral society?

what are your guys opinions or support?

I completely disagree with that statement. In fact, very often, religion has been a strong force opposing moral/ ethical development.

It is true that most religions offer a set of guidelines. The ten commandments are probably the most well known example. However, religious guidelines are not the only thing influencing morality.

The philosophy of ethics has evolved in parallel to religion. Sometimes it has been influenced by religious thought, but many times it has purposefully avoided taking it into consideration.

Non religious based ethics has played a very important role throughout history to evolve our concept of rights and lawmaking. Often it has had to fight hard to undo the resistance to change caused by adherence to religious theories/ interpretations.

Without getting too far into this, I have never seen any evidence that religion is an essential part of morality. For any example where religion has been shown to spur acts of kindness and fairness, I believe it would be fairly easy to find a counterpart (if not several).

Furthermore, many religions have (whether due to faulty interpretations or otherwise) stood in the way of developing rights for women, members of other faiths/ groups, homosexuals, animals, and so on.

Finally, I have never seen any statistics that showed any correlation between atheism and an increase in unethical behaviour. In fact, one can find a number of statistics that hint that the opposite might be true (if memory serves, crime rates and divorce rates were generally higher amongst many religious groups in the US).

This in itself does not prove anything, since atheists are a radically diverse group, and since so many factors play into these statistics. However in my opinion it does negate any chance of anyone being able to prove that religion is a mandatory component of ethics.

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