Can you be a good person without religion?
It all depends on what you mean by ‘good’ and what you mean by ‘religion’.
What most people mean by ‘good’ is “Try to be a nice person. Be normal. Have relatively good manners. Don’t do any of the big bad ones like killing someone or stealing or being a pervert. If you can, be involved in a good cause of some sort–like the soup kitchen or saving the rain forest.”
Morality for most people doesn’t have anything to do with a set moral code or particular rules to follow. It is more a sense of “feeling that you are a good person”. Part of this feeling good is tolerance of everyone else and outrage at hypocritical Christians who try to force their version of morality on others. So can you be moral in this way without being religious? Of course. Can you be good without going to church? Yes.
However, there is more to it than that.
Unfortunately, what many people consider “being good” is simply the absence of being bad, and “being bad” is limited to “hurting another person.” The majority of people would therefore consider themselves to be good as long as they have minded their own business and not consciously and intentionally hurt another person.
It doesn’t take much common sense to see that this definition of being good is…