Morality, it is the leash that binds us to our god. For the atheist, morality binds the individual to his own thoughts and perceptions about what right and wrong are, and what they feel they should be. In other words they are their god and they will do what ever they please. For the religious, morality binds the individual to what ever they believe their religion teaches them to be. If their god teaches them that they are moral for killing people who disagree with them, so be it. But, no matter what an individual believes morality is a leash that binds them to their god, like an animal chained to a pole.
Sigmund Freud taught that belief in god was wishful thinking, a crutch for those who could not rely upon themselves. Freud did not need any god telling him what to do, he could live quite the moral life without the help of religion, and probably better than some who went to any religious institution for over a 100 years. Many claim him to be the father of the sexual revolution, but he himself was a man who married and as far as any one knows was continuously faithful to the same woman through out his entire life. Freud would be considered by some today to be a prude, for much of his beliefs in regards to morality. Freud was just as moral as the next man, he just did not believe that god had anything to do with his morality.
I guess Freud was trying to make the point that one did not need religion in order to be moral.
A point that his life arguably made, but his teachings arguably did not make, for Freud had kept the chain of his morality tied to the religious views of his father while trying to tie them to the god known as himself. This god (that is Freud) believed that he could be just as moral as any man of faith without the need for religion or any god and so he set out and succeeded to do just that. He set his standards high, because he wanted to prove that he was a good man- without accrediting any of his goodness to any higher being.
Later those who would follow his ideology and beliefs would agree with him, that they did not need any god to be moral, but they would decide for themselves that certain things were not necessary in order to think one moral. Sex outside of marriage for example, my god (that is myself) says sex outside of marriage is okay. After all I would never buy a car without test driving one first, and since I am here I might as well try all the cars on the lot kind of mentality.
So morality is a leash tied to the god that one serves. If you are your own god, then you will define (within the limits of peers and societies) for yourself what morality is.
As a Christian, my morality is chained to the Word of God. If I read in scripture that something is good for me to do or bad for me to do I am perfectly comfortable living within such guidelines. I am like the Psalmist of Psalm 19 who says that the Word of God restores me, makes me glad, enlightens me, and keeps me from doing something stupid.
For hundreds of years Western society has found its morality to be chained to the Word of God, and as Westerners move more and more to making themselves to be the god of which their morality is chained to they move farther and farther from the Word of God which restores, gives joy, enlightens, and keeps them from doing something stupid. This will cause Western civilization to awaken one day and find that they no more know the difference between right and wrong, that they will say within the god of themselves that the ends justify the means. What is right for you is wrong for me, and what is wrong for you is right for me. Thus making it so that no one has any real moral standard at all.
Some might say to me, but C.S. Lewis argued that morality was proof that God existed. For we all have to admit, even those that do not believe in the existence of right and wrong, that if I steal from you that may be okay but if you steal from me we have a problem. Therefore proving that we all have an inner sense of right and wrong, and therefore we are ultimately unable to be unchained from God and His laws.
I would suggest that my disagreement with Lewis is only slight, for no matter how much man tries to unleash himself from God, God and His laws can never be totally contradicted. Examples of this are every where, from the musician who believes that life is the result of chaos, but he himself chooses and plans each note carefully for his masterful piece of music, to the mathematician who says that right and wrong do not exist but will be the first one to correct me when I miss multiply seven times seventy.
God will always have the last laugh because we are living in a world of His design, so we are playing by His rules. Morality may be the leash that binds us to our god, but it is God's chain and His creation (we are His creation) that we are toying with.
No matter how far we stray from the Word of God, no matter how corrupt we become morally the proof will always be there that we belong to God, that we are in fact created in the very image of God. Do you see any creature in the world (other than man of course) who is able to decide if they will do this or that? Do dogs have meetings and attend universities where they learn what the latest views and beliefs of dogs are?
Absolutely not. Why? Because they are not created in the image of God, they were not created to create, love, build, think, reason, and decide for themselves like man is.
So no matter what god we chain our morality to, the chain, god, and ourselves still belong to the one and only God of all that is visible and invisible (Colossians. 1:15-16, Hebrews 11:3).
This can all be summarized by saying that morality is the leash that binds us to our god, and our very discussion of what morality is only proves that we are in the image of the God of the Bible- and so it is He to which we should be bound to.