You are assuming those 2 have to go together. What if there is life after death but no judgement? Or even no gods, but after life? Try to think outside the box.
I think the leap in logic most of us have a problem with is "there is life after death......leap to....therefore you shouldn't eat shellfish, you should stone your son if he's disobedient, you can't remarry because that's adultery, you can't engage in lesbian sex.....because it says so in this book which is a collection of the stories of semi literate goat herders from a couple thousand years ago modified by a series of rulers who used this religion to control their populations" There may well be life after death. That has absolutely no bearing on if a particular religion and it's tenants have any truth to them. Trying to tell someone with a basic grasp of logic that they should embrace an arbitrary set of beliefs because life after death or because creation is basically insulting to our intelligence and should be to yours as well. Equally insulting is your idea that those who affirmatively reject a particular religion, especially christianity, do so because they're somehow "backsliders" who somehow can't hack the rules of god. In fact we've affirmatively rejected your religion because we believe that it is wrong and in many cases actually evil (Westboro Baptist - good folks? Parents who disown their children for being gay or sentence their daughters to a potential painful death from cervical cancer by refusing to allow them to get a safe and effective vaccine because it may lead them to "gasp!" have sex? Our own local bigot @GRULSTMRNN spewing his hate if you don't share your and his beliefs? If that's your religion, that's evil)
Without God and life after death there is no reason for morality. Take what you can get anyway you can get it because there is nothing else. Don't like someone - take them out. No reason not to. There are no consequences. Want money - steal it. No reason not to. You couldn't stop me and your couldn't catch me.
It's a terrifying thought that there is anyone, let alone a decent chunk of the world, that only behave morally because they're afraid of an invisible dude who's going to punish them.
Behave morally? Who’s to say what’s moral? Public Opinion? History’s full of cultures, societies that in our view today were down right evil but to them, they were “behaving morally”. The problem boils down to acknowledging there’s “absolute truth”, which points to a designer. Without that, morality is just one persons unsubstantiated measure.
No, actually there's a substantial body of work or morality absent religion, try reading Kant or Descartes, or Plato, or even better backing into a moral framework based on taking the time and effort to think about it yourself. Millions of us manage not to rape, murder, and steal because of our personal moral beliefs and not because of fear of punishment in the afterlife or out of fealty to an invisible man. And I'll add that millions of religious folks also refrain from evil because of their own personal moral values, not simply because they blindly follow a religion. The really scary ones are those who are so simplistic that they really are only moral out of fear or blind obedience, that's a truly evil person.
All morality in Western civilization, for over 1000 years, is based on the Bible. Our laws and US Constitution is based on it. British laws and culture is based on it. There has never been a more moral time in the history of the world and it is based on Judea-Christian ethics. Rome fell because they tried to do it without God. The Greeks fell because they tried to do it without God. Many of you here claim to be atheists, but you live ethically, by and large, as Christians. You can't help it. America is a Christian nation, always has been, always will be. Believe what you want, but you guys receive the benefit of Christ in this world.
An existentialist point of origin, some underlying universal cosmic morality only tries to answer the question from some random beginning, structure from chaos. Forget the atheistic approach where design appears but is ignored as proof. Things don’t naturally evolve on their own, they fall apart without external forces. Morality doesn’t exist by itself, it’s woven into our dna by design.