Can I just ask how anyone can be routinely shocked? Unless of course their not aware of the routine, but the OP clearly is, so how can he be shocked?

"I am routinely shocked..."
my captor has been doing it to me for the last 10 years since I was kidnapped but even so I've grown to like him
......I must be suffering from 'shockholm syndrome'

...but you think that it is “worse” to believe in these things and therefore you are “better” for not believing in better or worse.

Your argument is completely invalid.

Objective morality is such a tricky issue. On the one hand, I have a lot of difficulty accepting that "good" and "bad" are, with the proper tools, measurable in the same sense as are distance and temperature- which is, unless I'm mistaken, essentially what believing in objective morality would imply. On the other hand, I have five fingers, and on the OTHER, I have five more.

Evolution strikes me as a decent explanation for our perceptions of right and wrong. It makes evolutionary sense to cooperate with your fellow man, at least, it did for humans, and ants, and bees. The organism that went on killing sprees and pissed on everyone's food wasn't terribly likely to reproduce before being killed himself. The organism that helped a brotha out was more likely, and is arguably still more likely, to have kids.

We value altruism because altruism is a mark of evolutionary fitness.

Yes, some acts of altruism prevent reproduction- for example, throwing yourself in front of a bus to save an old man. But I reckon things like that are kind of like sickle cell anemia, in that they continue to exist as accidents of evolution because of their association with marks of evolutionary fitness (resistance to malaria in the case of Sickle Cell Anemia, propensity for societal functionality in the case of altruism).

So yeah, objective morality seems kind of unlikely.

The question of whether objective morality exists or not is a false question - morality is a word used to explain our general sense of right and wrong, not some kind of fact. We can draw connections and identify a kind of popular morality in a society, and in fact within our species. This we could call objective morality – the kind of morality which is shared by a vast majority of human beings. But to argue that objective morality does not exist is like arguing that kindness doesn’t exist – it obviously cannot be measured by experiment and yet it still exists in our daily lives..

'shockholm syndrome' I see what you did there Nigee

Synapse, there are plenty of people, particularly religious people, who believe that morality is more than a human construct.

Further, I'd hardly call something determined by popular appeal objective. Objectively popular, to be sure, but otherwise... that's pretty much the definition of subjective.

I have absolutely nothing against religion or religious people, but I do not share their beliefs. And they appear to be divided on key issues. Does morality come from the Ten Commandments? By following the example of Jesus (basically Bhuddism)? Or is it something that we simply feel we ‘ought’ to do, instilled in us by God?

I agree that there are moral values that we universally share and in this sense they are objective. Because the idea of morality itself is a human construct and therefore our idea of objective is correct in a sense – our inherent sense of right and wrong is within our DNA.

What I mean is that I do believe in an objective morality but I disagree with the terminology. Objective in this sense should not mean correct or true, but it should mean universal. As we are the only sentient beings, we have the right to form our own morality and deem it universally correct, even though it is only based on our own evolutionary values, as you stated.

@Dumbell
"I am shocked that you fellows put words in cteno's mouth. He said "good and evil or better and worse." He did not say "good and evil or right and wrong." Geez."

We're not putting words in his mouth. If you go back to page 1, I asked for clarification on whether the OP would distinguish between "good and evil" as distinct from "right and wrong". The OP failed to clarify, but the question sparked the ensuing discussion.