In Western Civilization, the concept of morality originated hand and hand with the concept of theism, with a concept of piety being central even for pagan cultures. Therefore, it is difficult to formulate an atheist concept of morality that's explicable to the religious, who presume that no morality could exist without God, or at least, the self-deception that there is a God.
They are wrong. As social animals, human beings are born with an inclination to find out what behaviors others expect of them and what behavior they should expect from others. More than that, find out what behaviors other people will cooperate to stop or punish, or reward. There are, of course, those who are deficient in morality, sociopaths and psychopaths, but for the most part, human beings are born to learn this.
To explain anything about atheist morality I first have to define it in a way that's not dependent on belief in God and show how it functions in a Godless universe. Like God, though, morality only exists in the mind of human beings. Unlike God, it's not an illusion. It's a behavior we all depend on.
A person is born to look for what behaviors are expected or prohibited from others, but also they are born with their own desires behaviors and so must alter their behavior and learn what the social group expects from everyone. From the interplay of these two, the person will eventually form a moral code.
(Last paragraph altered.)
To go on now:
So, the person's internal, subjective morality is then compromised with the social group's, whose code may more accurately be called inter-subjective rather than objective. The social group, by the way, might be a religion, a gang, a nation, or a political party. It might have a written code of laws that fit everyone's subjective morality just approximately. A person if free to explore, will look for one that compromises with their subjective morality the best. If a person is stuck in an authoritarian society, such as Saudi Arabia, they will generally conform their morality to it, and might become as stern as the society they are in. Since people are very adaptable.
Some of these social groups will have the morality written out in laws, such as in Christianity. In these cases, the moral code would be only a rough approximation of the inter-subjective morality of its members. The believers buy the entire package, including parts they might not personally like. Such as a believer might not have anything personally against gays & lesbians, but in Christian mythos, God, not humankind, dictates what's moral. Therefore, the believer must buy the whole code, and because they need most of it, they'll pretend to go along with all of it. Or do their level best to find reasons why being gay is sinful as murder.
Leaving psychopathic personalities out of this, atheists form their moral code exactly the same way Christians do, which is why atheists tend to be no more criminal than Christians, in fact, probably less.
So, that's a very general description of how a person forms a sense of morality or moral code.
To a large degree, people can agree on what is right and wrong, due to the fact that we're the same sort of social animal. Every moral facet also has an evolution-adaptive reason behind it, such as a disgust or outrage toward murder. It's because for any social group to be advantageous to its members, they have to be safer from each other than they would generally be without each other. Human beings evolved in strong social groups, hence, our brains create averse feelings in us regarding murder, and we act our feelings to prohibit and punish it.
Nevertheless, it's notable that there are exceptions allowed, and I'm not talking about abortion, which I will get to in the last part of this essay. Exceptions are made in the Bible. In case we think those are behind us, one was made just recently in the case of Osama bin Laden.
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