TIO

You took the words right out of my mouth, Lurkette! Thanks for posting; your posts in Philosophy are always well thought out, and I enjoy reading them.
However, one of my Christian friends made the counterpoint the other day: if he violates his morals, he is going to spend the rest of eternity in the fiery pits of hell (well, not that drastic, but you get the idea). If I violate my morals, I'm going to feel bad about it for a while. My morals are made by my own thought, and I understand them...but which of us has more incentive not to deviate?

I will make this known; I do not believe there to be any such things as absolute right, good, wrong, or bad. However, I am happy enough to identify relative ideas, and use the words in context. So if I say 'right,' I simply use the term because it is easier to say than "the socio-behavioral construct which suggests acceptable courses of action, most commonly known as 'right.'"

As for my morals: I believe that I have a responsibility to my fellow man, because he is a part of the society in which I thrive, and without him my life may sooner or later commence to suck. This responsibility is not a cosmic expectation; it is simply my acknowledgement that it is unreasonable for me to expect someone to act kindly towards me, unless I am prepared to act kindly towards him.
I also believe that I have 80 years (give or take) on this planet, after which I am dead. Kaput. There is nothing else at all; this 80 years is all I have, and all I ever will have. Likewise, you also have your 80 years, and nothing else (to the best of my knowledge). So it follows that the only true sin I can commit is to take even one second of that 80 years from you. So I will never commit murder. To take everything, quite literally everything that someone has, away from them, is such a shocking crime that I would not give it a second's consideration, not if it were my worst enemy.
But I am further obliged: I must also strive to make your 80 years comfortable and enjoyable, or at the very least, refrain from making any part of them worse. So I will not rape, I will not steal the products of your labour, and I shall try to refrain from calling you nasty things and making you miserable. In return, I feel that I am not being unreasonable to expect the same from you.
So that's where my morals come from: my desire for you to help me enjoy my 80 years, and my realisation that it is only reasonable, then, for you to expect the same from me.

As for your specific questions:
I don't care how old and infirm you are, you still have some of your 80 years left, so I will not take that from you. But while you're around, there's a lot I can probably learn from you that will improve the quality of my life.
I have no moral problem with polygamy. If you want an open relationship, go for your life. I, however, am wired with a desire for companionship, and I have found that my companionship with a girl is most effective and most secure when we are in an exclusive relationship, so I prefer monogamy and expect it in my partner. And please, don't call me amoral for supporting open relationships. My morals may not agree with yours at every point, but they do exist and I do take offense at the suggestion that they are any less real or legitimate than yours.

So my morals are free of the need for religion, but I propose that governmental structures are, as well. You seem to have a tacit assumption that atheists are anarchists, but I am quite happy in the capitalist democracy in which I live. Allow me to demonstrate:
We start with an anarchy of nonreligious persons. None of them are associated with each other. Sooner or later, though, they realise that if a few of them get together and pool their resources and talents, they will do better. Wham, you've got tribes.
Now those tribes are competing for resources, and fairly quickly discover that unless they band together, they will soon be taken out by other tribes. So groups of tribes band together under the most powerful warlords, and you soon have feudalism.
From there, the groups will all sooner or later fall to, or surrender to, the strongest warlord. There's your monarchy.
Now that most of the fighting is done with, people have some time to sit down and do some serious advancing, and with the technology comes communication and spare time, and big ideas start getting thought and passed around. Pretty soon, they start to demand a voice in how things are done (having forgotten that their ancestors surrendered to the ancestors of the king), and you have either a democracy or a constitutional monarchy.
Either way, now that some of the commoners are in power, all of the commoners want power, and it's pretty hard to stop people becoming equal before the law. But now that you are your own man, and you own your own stuff, and nobody is forcing you to work, you want rewards for your efforts, and when money is invented as a measure of the worth of a task, people start wanting more money to get more stuff, and you get capitalism.
There's one more step from there: people will then realise that Bill Gates has all the money, and wonder why he deserves it and they don't. It's possible that they will revolt and you'll end up with socialism or communism, but this will typically only happen if the vast majority of the population is composed of either the very poor, or idiots.

Anyway, I got a bit sidetracked, but I think I've said just about all I want to say now.

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Strewth