As a nonreligious person, where do you get your moral guidance?

[Anomalocaris]

But history didn't start with my parents. If we're of European descent, the culture we live in was shaped, like it or not, by Christianity. We may have shed the religious justifications, but a lot of our morality is directly descended from religion. 

History didn't start with the christians, either - and by the same rule like it or not religious moralities also came from somewhere or somewhen or someone before.  They don't issue forth fully formed out of the stories themselves..rather, the other way around.  Such that it makes little sense to say that human morality "comes from religion" when religion and morality are similar phenomena that share the same source, themselves, in human beings...and, were we to order the two in a chain of dependence, it's religion that depends on morality, and not morality that depends on religion.

A religious belief must be a moral belief, whereas a moral belief has no such requirement.

No, most religious beliefs are not moral beliefs.     However, if a religious belief is not in itself a moral belief, it is always used to bolster the religion’s perceived credential for imposing moral beliefs.      In fact, if a religion started out with a body of beliefs that are not moral beliefs in themselves, and are also not amendable for use in bolstering the region’s credentials for imposing moral beliefs, these beliefs will gradually be relegated to the sidelines and then forgotten or jettisoned.


Morality did not come from religion.   But religion exist to enable some people to aggrandize themselves by pretending to be uniquely essential, and uniquely credentialed, conduits for morality.

Essential - you burn in hell if you don’t.

Credentialed - god anointed ME with that little gem.