If People Simply Followed Their Respective Religion...

Today at work, a coworker and I were talking about morality and ethics. He argues that morality/values comes from religion. I can sort of agree that our value systems are influenced by religion, but what about atheists? They would have a different value system. For example, Christianity holds adultery morally wrong. An atheist may not have the same moral point of view. But what we can generally agree on is ethics, or what we as society hold to be right or wrong. A Christian and an atheist could generally agree that adultery is a breach of contract and therefore ethically wrong. Cool.

But before we arrived at that conclusion he made the statement, "If people simply followed their respective religion, then we wouldn't have all these problems." He's correct in a way. Christians would love their neighbor, Hindus and Buddists would be nice because of karma, Muslims and Jews would treat their brothers with respect, and atheists would follow the rule of law. Being Floridaegu, I, of course, had watched a funny video of what would happen if someone followed the bible literally.

So for your viewing pleasure, I give you a TED video.