Atheism is a quickly growing religious affliction (or lack thereof) in society today. The religious populations pull their values and their morals from their god or their books of worship, but where does a person who doesn’t have a god or book get their moral code?

Family - Although atheists don’t have a Jesus or a Bible in their life they do have family. A lot of values are distilled in people depending on their background. A family is supposed to teach a child the difference between right and wrong and these teachings follow offspring throughout their lives. Even if a person’s parents teach them using stories from the Bible and they become Atheist, it doesn’t mean that the values they were taught through the Bible disappear along with their belief in a god.

Upbringing - As implied before, what a person learns in their first decade or so of life can cement the kind of person they become and where they live while learning these morals can greatly affect them. Atheist or not, everyone has a hometown where some things were more acceptable then others. Learning as a child that loud music is bad can affect their personality and what they believe for life. In the teen years when hormones are raging and everything is all jumbled together, how your surroundings or neighborhood tell you to deal with this can influence how you think of it. For example, if your high school teaches abstinence, would that not influence the teens to be more conservative?

Education - Just like political views, education is directly related to how people think. Statistically speaking, college educated people tend to be more liberal. It’s not necessarily a fact that “all college people are Democrats” but it does tend to lean that way. Atheists who are educated beyond high school limits can derive their values from others around them in college. College is a giant melting pot. It’s a down-sized America with people of all different ethnicities and morals that can help push an Atheist into their views. Atheists who are more educated also have further opportunities in having more “out of their traditional box” experiences, allowing them to form their morals through new things.

Experience - “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” is what they say. Not everyone has the perfect life. There’s always a bump in the road and a challenge to be overcome and whether we think so or not, our brain and body learns from every experience we have. Atheists have life experiences just like us. They learn through life experiences just like we do. Their moral values become derived from these experiences as much as family, education, or upbringing.

Atheists are not a different kind of people; they’re just people who don’t have faith in a god. They trip just like we do, they cry just like we do, and they laugh just like we do. Even if they may not have moral values that come from the Bible, they do have moral values.