Can you practice morality without religion?

Yes you can have Morality and Ethics without Religion.

Religion has also caused the most Death and Destruction on this planet. How moral is killing people in its name? How moral is taking peoples homes and belongings and enslaving them in religions name?

It does not take religion, to be moral. It takes the ability to know what is right and what is fare. It could be by upbringing you learn that or it could be by just a gut feeling.

When some “religion or religious leader” says anything I tend to look for what they or the church gets from it. Bottom line truth they are in it for the money.  Churches has Rules to be a member, I do not remember Christ ever saying you have to do this to be in my Cliche. I sure don’t remember him handing out Parking Passes based on Tithe or putting on Big Rock Concerts every Sunday to draw people in. And I sure know he did not have Mega Mansions to live in. I bet he would have also grabbed the Old Blue Hairs gossiping about everyone in the corner that paid the highest tithe and told them the sin they were committing was not worth all the tithe they paid.

The same place God can be found in Christians (heart and soul) you can find the morals of someone who is not religious, cares about it or even knows about it. Being a good person is not based on religion but saying to yourself I will treat people the way I want them to treat me (even if they do not know that is in the bible) Morality is knowing right from wrong and that can simply be because of knowing the law or just knowing eternally what is right and wrong.

But the biggest of all Morals. Being able to say you were wrong and being able to apologize to someone and mean it. Without remorse there can be no morals.

I am not religious for the most part. I grew up in church and Christianity from both sides of my family. But, I found metal, and the devil got into me then. lol. My home decor is all metal, goth, japanese and anime. It’s not something a preacher would want to enter. :P. BUT, I consider myself a very moral person despite my aesthetic tastes. I also don’t go on sex crazed parties either, even though people think that’s what metalheads do. In fact, I don’t sleep around either, and never have. I also never liked metal or goth to find something to fit in with like most people do. I was told once that I can’t be conservative and a goth, and that just proved to me that those people were really in it because that’s what they were, they were doing it to fit in. Forced to like a fake ruleset to fit a narrative. Something I refuse to do. I’ll vote for Donald Trump and listen to goth all day if I please. I could give two shits what other people think of it.

A lot of the things in the bible are simple morals that should be relevant to everyone frankly. You don’t have to believe in god to know thou shalt not murder (it’s actually translated wrong by most people. it is NOT thou shalt not kill) is a good thing to follow. Not cheating on your wife is a good thing, not just because the bible mentions it. Treating each other decently is not something you should only read in the bible. They are pretty much universal morals imo.

The problem with the world today is that society has turned away from morality. The line you aren’t supposed to cross keeps being pushed further and further to where we now have flat out lunatics running around not knowing which direction is up from day to day because their pronouns keep changing to try and fit the narrative tick tock has mindwashed them to believe. They are doped up on prescription or non-prescription drugs because they can’t handle anything. The media bombards kids with division and immorality daily. We have kids going to drag queen shows that have “Not going to lick itself” written on the wall for them all to read. That is SICKNESS! Flat out. This is what happens when you ignore basic simple and logical morality. When society is nothing but debauchery. They keep pushing the line farther and father. You watch, pedophilia will be the next cause to fight for, it has already picked up ground if you look into it.

People care more about what is trending on Twitter than they do about their kid being indoctrinated at school. People are being led around on a string by lies. The media has mindwashed the masses. The governments push these lies as facts. People are too blind to see it all. They are too caught up in it and caught up in their credit card debt, what’s the new car to buy, porn or sitcoms. To caught up in worrying about fitting in or being part of the heard. Well, I never have fit in and I don’t WANT to fit in. Fitting in is weak.

Society has always decided what is right and what is wrong.

No religion needed. Germany of the 30’s was not about religion it was about what society decided was.  Or heck even Slavery, was agreed by society to be OK but then decided NOT OK. Heck even in America we have laws based nothing on religion but on needs of society. Show me in the bible where slavery is ok, or executions of people from a different religion or non-religion even. Society said yes and then No and visa versa.

Society is who decides and always will. Even in ROME before Christ society did.

First: Define morality.   Then: Define religion.

Morality is based on values, on the idea of a choice between right and wrong. What is an objective definition of values and how do you define right and wrong?
By what standard can we measure good and evil and define right and wrong?

Obviously, simple obience to dogma (as demanded by religion) is insufficient. When your god demands obedience to one code and my god demands obedience to another, and then someone else comes along and says “god isn’t real”, you’re stuck.

So what can we base right and wrong on? How can we objectively define values?
Let’s start with something simple: material value.

A diamond is valuable, right? What is the value of a diamond on the moon though?  Nothing, because there is no living being to value it.
Likewise, if you are crossing the desert and you come across someone who offers you a bottle of water or the biggest diamond on the planet, what do you choose? The water. Because without your life, that diamond is worthless to you.
Likewise we can observe the same in the animal kingdom. A dung ball is worthless to us, but means everything to the beetle risking its life to roll it across a field.

The standard of value is that which benefits life. Both material and immaterial. The behaviors humans throughout all cultures value, honesty, kindness, hard work, etc are those which benefit the life of either the individual or the group. The things most cultures agree on are bad: theft, violence, murder, cheating are that which harm life.

Now of course you can say: “if what benefits life is moral, how about I steal from someone? That benefits my life after all.”  But not so hasty. Human civilization advances through building and creating. Anything that benefits the unproductive at the expense of the productive is immoral, because it harms society and by extension human evolution. By this very reason we can also deduct that the welfare state and redistribution of wealth are morally wrong, and a simple observation of western society confirms this. Since the introduction of the welfare state, not only have virtually all measures of wealth, optimism, family unity and civilization dropped, but for the past 60 years, even the average IQ in western nations has dropped for the first time in history.

We can measure the morality of a policy by its result. If it benefits life, it is moral.

Do we need religion for this? No.

But is it not true that the moral decay of Western civilization has correlated with the loss of religion?  Yes, this is also true. But a correlation does not establish a causal effect.
If the decline of Christianity was directly responsible for moral decay, non Christian countries would be savage hellholes. And yet, Atheist countries like Japan, Czech Republic, South Korea and others flourish. Hindu India is flourishing and improving as well.

Focusing on today alone is also shortsighted. Nazi Germany was 96% Christian, with Hitler famously banning all Atheist organizations in his first month in office, confiscating the free thinker society’s headquarters in Berlin and gifting it to the Protestant Church. In 1938 he bragged about having “stamped out the scourge of Atheism”. He repeatedly denied that humans evolved from primates and in Mein Kampf mentions his Christian faith over 130 times. Atheists were banned from the SS (the troops who supervised the concentration camps) and banned from various government jobs. Contrary to American WW2 propaganda (which focused on Himmler and Rosenberg, two Pagans who wanted to replace Christianity with a Germanic religion), Nazi Germany was very much a Christian country. More so than the US at the time.

I would argue the moral collapse of the West is indeed partially due to the loss of traditional religion. See studies have shown that religiosity is mostly genetic. Most people are genetically religious. No, that doesn’t mean you’re born Christian or Muslim. It means that at some point in human evolution, religiosity proved to be an evolutionary benefit, i.e. when an idea larger than the just the rule of the current alpha male allowed people to form larger groups and gain a head starts on civilization. Religion helped people unify and achieve greater things together. Of course there are other unifying ideas out there like freedom, national pride, racial pride, family, culture etc.  And hence not all people are genetically religious. The full effect of this mutation isn’t understood, but in general it leads to higher trait agreeability and lower trait individualism.
What it means in practice is a that religious people are more obedient and more eager to believe things without proof. This has been shown again and again in scientific studies with Atheists routinely exhibiting the highest degrees of distrust of strangers. Atheists tend to not be the most social types.

What happens when a “genetically religious” person is raised without religion as most of today’s youth? They find new religions:  Wokeism, veganism, satanism, feminism, socialism, global warming…    Basically they’ll believe any stupid crap you throw their way. And then they will build a religion around that crap, complete with blasphemy laws, censorship, inquisition and witch trials. They continue to be religious, only worse, because their new religion will be provided by psychopaths on a power trip (the government).

With all this talk about religion, what is religion really? As stated in the opening post, it provides people a code to live by. All religions do. What religion doesn’t provide is a rational argument for its code or proof of its god being real. Religion – by definition – is an authority system based on belief. Not reason, not logic, not science. Belief. Christianity and Islam specifically single out belief in god as a requirement for not being tortured for eternity. By definition, belief can only exist in the absence of proof. No one “believes” in gravity or the sun, because obviously they’re there. Religion cannot provide proof of god’s existence, because the very notion to do so would render the central moral virtue moot.
Religion as a system is based entirely on authority. God doesn’t argue with people. He commands. (Except in Buddhism and Judaism to a degree, Buddha actually demanded his followers put his teachings to the test and question everything he said. And Israelite literally means “he who wrestles with god”. Moses famously argued with god). Christianity like most religions demands absolute submission. It’s laws are absolute, and you better not violate them or else!

On a personal level, the act of submission essentially means adopting someone else’s values for your own. Whether one submits to god or government or the woke mob, it means you’re outsourcing the responsibility of defining morality, and of choosing between right and wrong. You outsource your morality based on either belief or fear.
Depending on who gives the orders, this can lead you to living a moral life. But absent any proof, you run the risk of being not only wrong, but also serving the wrong people.

But if you think for yourself, try to define objective values and judge your choices by their impact on your own life and others, that is when you cease to be a drone and acquire objective moral agency.

Religions in many fashions, are for the majority, the foundation of all civilized society and morals. Prior to human beings believing in higher powers, you mostly had a savage/survival mentality.

People would potentially not just do anything they wanted, when absent any beliefs in God’s, merely because of fear or forced structure in a hierarchy.

As the belief in God, God’s, or higher power became more prevalent, humans began developing more civility. Now, that’s not to say it’s been without flaw.

Generally religions, especially like Christianity, although not exclusive to it, brought about a more modern morality in teaching all life is precious.

People bastardizing religion and making wars for it are simply false prophets and not actually of the religion. Claiming religions themselves are responsible for mass killings if their word is opposite, isn’t correct.

I agree with the OP. Without religions, and especially Judeo-Christian values that helped found America, we would not have nearly what we call morality. We are seeing it decay more in recent days sadly.

I’m guessing you chose to skip the part where I said “Religions” helped morality. The Judeo-Christian example was merely for American example. None of those practices you stated are without religion. Japan, was an exceedingly poor example. During WW2 they were highly immoral, slaughtering Korean and Chinese with no justice cause. They raped countless victims and were devoid of any morality. Their current prosperity was a result from America’s generosity and morals, to rebuild them and help them integrate back into the world.

Although quite an amazing word salad you formulated, you gave no evidence of Japan’s morality, for example, exclusive of religion. Thry have been Shinto and now more Buddhist, both with morality founded in spiritual, not atheist sense.

There is no major representation of morality upholding without spirituality and religion. The Czech Republic was amoral communists up to 40yrs ago, now they are considered rank #5 in the world in corruption with a 10% unemployment rate as well.

When Japan strayed from morality and into mere political power, that’s when their rape and pillage of South Korea and the Chinese coast happened. That is literally to this day the reason the US has issues with China. They can’t comprehend how we forgave Japan’s depravity as China sided with us during WW2.

Your examples are sadly flawed and do not refute the OP. Morality does not exist with any exceeding success, with religion or religious style spirituality. It doesn’t exist, it hasn’t existed, and morality is birthed from it.

Take care✌️