People nowadays often forget that many of the values and ideas we hold now, have an origin found in religion. They forget that ideas formulated in the medieval centuries still hold, though sometimes hard to distinguish. Though religion is not the only source for modern values, it was an active one. During the middle ages, the world was sacralized, and philosophy was a way to serve religion. We now see a believe that we are very rational, and that our values are often based on the rationalism and separate from religious ideas. During the middle ages, emotivism ruled. Emotivism is the idea that emotions decide what actions you will take, not logic. Reason is submissive to emotion; emotion determines our thinking. You can only act rationally, if your emotions support your action. Philosophy ruled as the intellectual manifestation of religion, rational arguments were used to support religions ideas, this was called theurgy. It is of course still debated whether people are rational / or emotional, but overall we see people can also still act based on emotions. Ideas like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ often have their origins in religious ideas. One need only look at modern law and see many religious ideas manifested here. One can look for example at the seven deadly sins, Avaritia, greed which brings about crimes such as theft, can be seen in laws about theft of course. Luxuria, lust, we can see in in laws about sexual abuse. But also modern values about being hard working are based on Acedia.
What is also often forgotten, is that what we call ‘western society’ involves many ideas based on Arab culture/civilization. There was no such thing as a distinction between western and eastern civilization, many pillars of our society have origins in Jewish and Muslim culture. But what we currently see in the world, manifested in Islamophobia are ideas that Arab/Muslim culture is backward and subordinate to western society. Which is ironic, seeing how many of western culture has origins in Arab culture.
An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy 