Can morality exist without religion?

Just about everyone tries to be a good person. But what determines what it means to be “good”? Throughout history, many people, if not most, have turned to religion as a source of moral guidance. Yet, plenty of people are not religious, raising an important question: Can morality exist without religion? (Please explain your answer)

I would rather ask the opposite: can moral exist within a religion? Religion gives you dogma, rules to follow. Your remaining choice is whether or not to follow the rules.
If you are only following the rules, you're not making any moral choices, using any kind of moral.
If you don't follow the rules - unless you believe all those times are your failure, you committing sin, which would mean any actual choice you make is morally wrong - then you aren't fully following the religion, you have some other morality and you are using the religion only as one partial guideline of your morals.

If there is NOTHING to measure your concept of "good" against, then how do you know what "good" is?

Yes because everyone has a conscience.
Romans 2
for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, 15 who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them

DrLeftover wrote:

If there is NOTHING to measure your concept of "good" against, then how do you know what "good" is?

You can measure things against the neutral state of their absence. Like heat, there's not really such thing as "cold" to contrast it, there's only less and less of heat down to theoretical zero.

But I don't see why ignoring religion would remove directly the concept of evil and good only through that lack of contrast?
I think "evil" is more recognizable thing in human behavior than "good". I believe that with this kind of logic we'd be sooner questioning whether there is really evil because we'd have no religious good to measure it against. (To which I'd be saying same as above, that there's reason for minimizing evil even if an opposite good didn't exist.)

Also that makes me think that a more profound basis of morality is not doing evil than actively doing something definitive good. There's a lot of "thou shalt not".

Kaunisto wrote:

DrLeftover wrote:

If there is NOTHING to measure your concept of "good" against, then how do you know what "good" is?

You can measure things against the neutral state of their absence. Like heat, there's not really such thing as "cold" to contrast it, there's only less and less of heat down to theoretical zero.

But I don't see why ignoring religion would remove directly the concept of evil and good only through that lack of contrast?
I think "evil" is more recognizable thing in human behavior than "good". I believe that with this kind of logic we'd be sooner questioning whether there is really evil because we'd have no religious good to measure it against. (To which I'd be saying same as above, that there's reason for minimizing evil even if an opposite good didn't exist.)

Also that makes me think that a more profound basis of morality is not doing evil than actively doing something definitive good. There's a lot of "thou shalt not".

What about those that are a law unto themselves and then decide what is good and evil.

A shining example would be Pol Pot

Every single person decides what is good and evil, unless they follow certain religion's view and that is a decision in itself.

Law and moral, while obviously related, are separate things - except in some theocracies.
Laws are usually moral twisted to fit practicality, sort of realpolitik.
This also goes for dictatorships. But generally I think we can say that dictators, despite typically giving people under them a dogma to follow on what is good and evil, are by no means trying to be good persons. Genuine benevolent dictatorship is a rare occurrence (most likely to happen in middle of a long peace era dynasty).
From which we get to me disagreeing with this:

Jazzy wrote:

Just about everyone tries to be a good person.

No, there's quite a lot of people who ignore morality for practicalities and don't in any way try to be good. More often that is by demanding conditions where being "good" would be too much to ask. But also people in high positions (or aiming to such), ones who have most to lose, can consider they can't afford to be moral (although they'll usually look for justifications and moral excuses for their behavior).