The way ethics and religion are associated
There is a wide range of opinions on the way ethics and religion are associated. There is a prospect that faith is the ideal source of ethics, and another that maintains ethics relies upon human assumption justified by appeals to reason. The way these two differences of opinion are explained leaves limited scope for accommodation or reasonable answers to daily problems.
The relationship mentioned above is more of a correlation between faith and logic. Faith is based in some degree on the belief that God shares insights about living and its actual application. These insights are gathered in texts called the Bible and presented as a publication. According to this theory, things are wrong for very unintuitive reasons, i.e., Things seem wrong when they cause a lot of pain, eliminate good things from the earth, etc. But, this approach means they’re only evil because God said so.
From a stringently humanistic view, ethics is based on the principles of reason: Anything that is not reasonably correct cannot be deemed legitimate. From this view, moral laws need not obtain their jurisdiction from religious belief. Instead, these laws are supported for their use in developing autonomous and capable individuals—people responsible for making decisions that maximize their welfare while appreciating others’ welfare.
Shafer-Landau points out that God is conceived of as being morally absolute. This means that God eternally does what is morally accurate and morally sound. He is perfect by description. When we say that God is morally absolute, what we mean is that God never does wrong; i.e., He always acts by what is morally right. This seems to imply that there is an ethical measure by which we find God’s doing when we assign the label “morally perfect.” Again, then God is morally absolute in only a trivial way.
In concurrence to Shafer-Landau, an unbeliever is in a unique position to be moral for the sake of being ethical, even though they will not be punished for eternity if they are not good, and this is far more admirable.