When I was a young teenager, I gave a lot of thought to the concepts of morals and values. I recognized in myself a strong sense of values, yet I did not want anyone to think of me as a person of morals. The pastor of the church my family attended had recently revoked our membership, on account of my mother's fiance moving in with us before they were officially married. I had heard that marriage once meant simply setting up house together, which made sense to me. The pastor, on the other hand, reasoned differently according to his interpretation of a set of moral rules.
The difference between values and morals is the difference between sense and reason. A moral system of rules is taught. It is a prescription for living a right life. A value system, on the other hand, is felt within a person. As a person of strong values, I operated according to what felt right in any given situation. I most always knew how I felt about things. It was an inner knowing that simply came to me when I needed guidance. Some people call it following your heart. Some call it intuition. The pastor, along with a lot of people I knew, operated according to a set of rules written out and taught apart from an inner sense of rightness. Right and wrong were instead spelled out in concrete terms to be obeyed regardless of any niggling sense of discomfort with the rules.
When the pastor told us that God already knew what lay ahead in any person's life so that a baby who died but would have gone on to commit sins would go straight to Hell, I felt that sense of doubt. When my mother spoke up about her own doubt on the subject, the pastor instructed her to have faith and accept the teaching regardless of her inner knowing that babies are blessedly innocent.
I can look back and see that my family and that church were not meant to be, but the pastor's curses and ostracism hurt at the time. His surety that he was doing the right thing in banishing my family and pronouncing us bound for eternal damnation set me on course to discover what truly felt right and was of most value with regard to respect, tolerance, flexibility, compassion, and acceptance of differences.
For a while after receiving the pastor's harsh judgments, I distrusted the church and its moral system. Nowadays, though, I have gone back to following my heart and looking for the value in every situation. If it feels right, that is good enough for me.