Dargo

A Theist recently loaned me the collected works of Francis Schaeffer. He's been dead for twenty years but apparently his books were considered very influential among Christians in their day.
In one chapter he was rambling on about the "superiority" of Christian morals to the morals of the world. This long winded drivel could be summed up as Christians get their morals from God, and God is good so Christian morality is good. Without realizing it, Schaeffer stated the greatest flaw in Christianity. In Vol. 1 page 302 he said "The Christian should be in the front line, fighting the results of man's cruelty, for we know that it is not what God has made." The frequent failure of Christianity to oppose human cruelty (especially sense Christians themselves are often the source of this cruelty) has done more to undermine the credibility of the Christian religion than any words spoken by us evil skeptics.

Stephen T-B

My theory, for what it's worth:
Morality is do with inter-human relationships
Religion is concerned with the relationship between human beings and the gods they worhsip.
When religious teaching encompasses morality, such as the Commandments which proscribe murder, theft, bearing false witness and honouring one’s parents, it does so because religious and political leadership is being combined in a single hierarchy. Thus Moses was not only a conduit between God and the Jews, but he was also the Jews’ political leader and as such had an interest in establishing rules of conduct between members of that community so as to preserve social stability and cohesion and individual security, as well as establishing the more esoteric requirements of their religion.
Jesus,”the King of the Jews” was also a political leader, which is why the Romans crucified him and why much of his teaching also had a moral element.
The Jewish priesthood curtailed its political role or it would not have been tolerated by the Romans Morality was therefore outside its jurisdiction.
Religion is without compassion or morality because neither comes into the relationship between humans and their gods So when abortion and euthanasia are objected to on religious grounds it is because they contravene a religious doctrine, in this case the doctrine of the sanctity of life which nevertheless has not prevented Christians from taking life, and sometimes in hideously cruel ways in the belief that they were performing a religious duty.
I believe that moality is represented most succinctly in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies by his character Mrs Do-As-You-Would-be-Done-By.
If we all did as we would be done by, human society would be greatly improved.
Religion on its own has done nothing to improve human society. The Christian philanthropists of the late 19th Century - Elizabetgh Fry, Lord Sahftsbury, Wilberforce et al - had humanitarian impulses which they were able to validate by reference to the teachings of Christ.
Those same teachings, however, have also been used by other Christians to give the authority of God to their very inhumane impulses