I think unless you have been both religious and atheist, it’s hard to compare which results in better morals and values. It’s a common misconception that having a god free life will result in an immoral or amoral existence. It’s simply not true. Leaving religion felt empowering and made me think seriously about which values mattered to me.
Humans have always had the capacity to be good to each other inside them. The idea that religion or god is necessary for that is demonstrably false.
I did not claim that you can’t do good deeds without a belief in God, far from it. I simply stated that if you don’t have a belief in God, you don’t believe in the final and ultimate, judge. This makes it generally harder for us to do good, but not impossible. For instance, you now are focused on values that matter ”to you”, but a belief in God makes it easier to abide by values that matter to everyone else. Again I’m not dealing in absolutes so you may have a specific experience that is hard to reconcile with these generalizations.
> For instance, you now are focused on values that matter ”to you”, but a belief in God makes it easier to abide by values that matter to everyone else.
That right there is the root cause of all the problems with religions. If you don’t believe in what everyone else in the community believes in then you don’t belong to the community and hence you are the enemy. My god is the ultimate judge not 999 other gods out there.
> but a belief in God makes it easier to abide by values that matter to everyone else
What tends to happen if I look around the world is that instead of "everyone else" it's more like "what some religious version of a politician/dictator/tribal-committee/etc thinks is a value".
Take one example most "westeners" would probably agree is a bad version of this: the Taliban. Afghanistan is now ruled by the religious beliefs of an organization made up of people that have very strong beliefs and that - from what news we can get on it - do not hesitate to enforce with violence. I'm sure internally there's the 'regular' power struggles and social dynamics you will find in almost all of the rest of humankind to gain the upper hand. So what about _everyone else_ in Afghanistan that just wanted to live the lives they got accustomed to in the past ~20 years?
The Catholic church nowadays I suppose is more of a political organization but in its past it comes a lot closer to the above. Nevermind the hiding of sexual abuse by priests and shielding them from prosecution. To me it matters that these offenders get behind bars. Now. I think most of _everyone else_ feels the same.
I picked out two examples here but there's a ton of other examples and you can use any major or minor religion for this.
Don't get me wrong, I share a lot of beliefs about what one should or shouldn't do w/ Christianity and some other religions and law makers. I don't need to believe in a deity for that though. I don't mind if someone else does. Feel free, no problem. Just do not try to make me believe in the deity or use the deity as an argument. Or worse, use violence to make me comply with "believing" in it and practicing it.
The only data point I've seen that empirically supports religious prevalence is that very christian countries have a statistically significantly lower level of dishonesty. (see: China for a counterexample)
Humans have always had the capacity to be good to each other inside them. The idea that religion or god is necessary for that is demonstrably false.