Way to not answer any of the assertions put forth. You are a great representative of religious people.

Shun those who disagree with your religious views. Romans 16:17

Paul, knowing that their faith would crumble if subjected to free and critical inquiry, tells his followers to avoid philosophy. Colossians 2:8

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

It seems everyone, Christians and non-believers alike, knows the Bible didn’t suddenly drop from the sky with God’s own autograph attached. We do accept that men wrote the Bible, both the old and the new Testaments. Don’t we?

Upon what truths did these men rely when writing these documents?

I submit there were two sources of information upon which the scriptures were written.

One is the subjective experience of those who claimed to witness miracles. Take for example the story where Jesus is supposed to have fed a large crowd of people with only a few fish and loaves of bread. An alternate explanation could be that the people themselves had carried their own fish and bread with them. The inspiring speech of Jesus motivated them to share what they had with the crowd. An observer may have experienced the sudden appearance of enough fish and bread to feed the crowd as a miracle and reported it in this way. Jesus performed miracles; therefore Jesus is God.

The story may well have a good moral message, but it is simply not necessary to attribute a miracle to Jesus and claim morals came from God. Men observed the happening, and men wrote the Bible, period.

Subjective experiences of people are still reported today. There are those who insist they have seen ghosts, those who insist they have been abducted by aliens, and those, like Joseph Smith who insisted that he had received tablets directly from God. Hoax? Delusion? Miracle? You decide.

Many have insisted their experiences are accurate and true. Most of these claims have been debunked, and some were proven to be hoaxes.

Then there those who claim to have received revelations directly from God.

Let’s look at a scientific experiment done by Newberg and D’Aquili. The experiment was designed to measure brain activity during the meditation of monks, and the praying of nuns. What they discovered is that during intense concentration essentially what happens is the area of the brain that normally orients the person in the real world goes AWOL. I mean it shuts down. I personally think it’s amazing what humans can do with and to their own brains. Perhaps this is the pheromone that accounts for revelations. These revelations, I’m thinking St. Paul, are what the men who wrote the Bible wrote into the scriptures.

Then of course, as we all know, the Bible underwent a tedious editing process, by men, and several times. Hence there are different versions of the Holy Book.

OK, now back to the original question about where do morals come from.

If you accept the Bible as the source of our morals, and you accept that men wrote the bible, it seems logical that you would accept that our morals came from men whose stories were based on subjective experiences and so called revelations from God. The only logical conclusion I can think of is that since men wrote the Bible, the morals it teaches come from men.

I use the word men here as opposed to people because men were pretty much in charge of our societies and thus our morals during the time of those writings in the Bible. Women were written about, as was Ruth in the old Testament, but I highly doubt they did the writing, or the editing.