Two main competing worldviews in America are the secular and the Christian. Secularist adherents live for the here and now believing there's no hell to shun. In the secular one that means the government is the ultimate authority and we are not ultimately responsible to God--but only reckon ourselves justified in our own eyes. Making choices based on informed decisions is important, not being right or wrong--since there is no absolute truth or right and wrong (ultimately they believe there is no hell to shun and can do whatever they can get away with). In the Christian worldview, we are ultimately accountable to God (cf. Psalm 10:4) and are His stewards of the gifts and blessings given to us. There is a final judgment and one must live life accordingly. There isn't always justice in this life, but God is just and will serve it in the afterlife. God's authority trumps the government's and "we must obey God rather than man" when they conflict and this is called civil disobedience.
If you don't have a worldview at all, no matter what nature, you don't have a take on reality and a way to interpret and comment on life itself--you simply have no valid opinion worth noting. Now, if you take God out of the equation and try to reconcile reality without Him in the picture, life, and its outlook become very bleak and hopeless: "Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless," according to atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell. Life without reference to God becomes a "useless passion" according to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Everything we understand has to do with the basic question of whether there is a God (life's most meaningful endeavor of inquiry) and the impact and influence it has on you. With God, we simply have dignity because we are not some cosmic accident, but created beings in God's image, not evolving animals who are free to live and act unaccountably like animals too. There are those, of course, who claim to believe in God and live in immorality and are, in effect, for all purposes practical atheists. Some atheists live pretty upright and praiseworthy lives in the eyes of man. However, their motive is to please man and not God, and is therefore selfish and misdirected. Soli Deo Gloria!
