Who Owns Morality?

Here is a quote I found on a youtube comment fight about torture:

I am really heartened that liberals have suddenly found religion or at least morals. Though I don't think they understand why they have these morals. In fact, if they really think about it, they probably would be confused given their unnatural devotion to relativism and academic freedom and free thought etc.

(This quote is not from the guy in the picture! And I added the halo myself.)

I agree that most liberals do not really think excessively about morals. And I suppose it goes against the ideas of freedom of thought and tolerance. So let's think about it then, and here are the first two questions

- Do we even know what is right and wrong? If so, how did we decide what it is?

Knowledge of right and wrong does exist at all levels of our society. And these ideas are not dependent on religion, or law. We all know it is wrong to attack an innocent person who is doing nothing to threaten us. We all know it is wrong to torture people. We know it is right to be tolerant of other people. We all know slavery and racism is wrong. Not everyone will always do what is right, some people may even make excuses for what bad things they do. But the knowledge morality remains, because we, as a society do not glorify or worship bullies, sadists, or racists. And they know in their hearts that what they are doing is immoral and wrong. Well, most of them do anyway.

There may be some societies that do glorify hatred to minorities, and worship their all-conquering armies and slavery. Ancient Sparta comes to mind, I am sure there were others. But they have their own ideas of morality, and we have ours. So I conclude that we do know what is right and wrong.

The follow-up question is "How did we come to decide what is right and wrong?" Why did we decide that ignoring insults is morally superior to violence. Why did we decide it was wrong to discriminate against, and even massacre minorities? Because in some other societies, bullying may be taken as a virtue. It is not just a coincidence that the teachings of Jesus have been handed down for the last 2000 years, and still are a close match for what we consider to be right and wrong. You don't actually have to be a Catholic or a Christian to have those values, in fact there have been plenty of notable lapses in morality on the part of some religions. So it is hard to deny that morality in our society was inspired by the words of Jesus, and has remained in our collective conscience. You don't have to be a Christian and believe in God or heaven or hell or miracles or creation to have this moral compass. In fact believing in God and the supernatural is no guarantee that you are moral according to Jesus' words. Liberals who believe in science are just as likely to be moral as anyone else.

Finally, yes we do know the difference between right and wrong, and it seems to be something inspired by Jesus. Or at least it matches very closely to the teachings of Jesus. But our morality is not under the authority of any single religion or legal code, it exists in our collective conscience. And it is reflected in our laws and our behaviour to some extent, although imperfectly. No religion or propaganda will be able to easily change this no matter how much they tell us that Jesus really meant to say something different.

A post script here: The subject of Abortion is often used by organized religion against free thinkers. I'm not sure what Jesus said about abortion, I actually think he didn't say too much about it. But I know, actually, we all know, it is not right. The issue is not "is it right or wrong" the argument is "how severely and when do we punish for it?". I happen to be on the side that is reluctant to punish a young girl who has been raped and had an abortion. If you think punishing her is right, then let's debate it. But don't say I have no moral compass just because I think other issues are more important.