If the only reason you would behave decently is from fear of a (possibly only hypothetical) god, it seems that religion has degraded your innate moral sense.
Can we conjecture that this is an evolutionary value to religion? For humans to survive as a social animal we need to have an innate moral sense to keep us operating in our societies. Since this is extremely important to our survival perhaps there is value in a backup plan?
Thus for those of the population whose innate moral sense is broken (that is those who are intrinsically amoral or even evil) there is a plan B-- this is what religion is. It imposes morality on those broken individuals from the outside to protect society from them.
Thus, when these individuals say that without God people will behave in all sorts of horrible ways they might be right -- for themselves. They are basically evil (or, at best, immoral) individuals who must have the plan B God to control them.
The statics supplied earlier seem to support this conjecture.
Perhaps we should be more careful before we tinker with religious beliefs while presuming that the religious are all as innately moral as many atheists are? Religion may not have degraded their innate moral sense it may be a prosthesis for it.
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