Is Religion A Basis For Morality?

Morality is set of principles guiding us to evaluate that what is right or wrong, and it builds the personal character, reasonable behavior and choices of a person as well as helps people to justify decisions, goals, and actions all through the life. The fabric of any society is held together by the standards of morality that we maintain and practice. The values our personal set is the belief about what is important, unimportant, right, wrong, good, and bad which have the same value with morality. When we are confronted by choices, opinions, or moral dilemmas, the decisions we make will indicate what values we hold. Morality gives worthiness and respect to life. Moral values are a kind of standard that teach us good virtues such as honesty,

From the perspective of equality, freedom, and improving the human condition, it is easy to say that religious laws are highly immoral, and thus are a detriment to the development of our society. An example of this is for the thousands of years that religions have to address longstanding issues like slavery, race and gender equality, and sanctity of life, but all of these issues are failed to deal and solve. Even today, in Kashmir and other Islamic nations, women are forced to wear burkas from head to toe. This rule is only the one which is on a long list of Islamic laws that subdue women; the list includes ideas that women cannot marry without male guardian's permission, in addition, the rule is even restrictive for women's freedom that they cannot travel outside of their hometown without a male chaperone who must be a close relative; and for the most frightening, a woman's witness is worth half that of a man's. There is also a fact exist that shows a lack of respect toward women, which is that women cannot be the priests in the Catholic Church. It is not only women who have been lowered in status are treated invidiously by the religious world, but also the homosexuals are inequitable to be treated in the religious world. In the article "Atheism Teaches Morality and Ethics", Paul Kurtz recognizes that "Some conservative religious moralists seek to enact a constitutional amendment that would prohibit it. They insist that marriage must be between one man and one woman, as is divinely sanctified by the Bible; further, they believe that heterosexual marriage is threatened by gay marriage" (5). These are obsolete ideas which are stripping a group of people based on their fundamental rights of the sexuality as human beings; these kinds of crosscurrent