Atheists will claim that their sense of right and wrong comes from themselves, and that they don’t need any outside influence. They’re intellectually dishonest, however, if they say they don’t have bad as well as good impulses, because I know I do. I’m a potential monster, but it’s my belief in a higher power that keeps me from being one. True, I am conditioned by society, but I believe that conditioning originates from religious values. That’s probably the point which atheists disagree with.
I used to be an atheist, but at least I was an honest atheist.
I had concluded that, since I had no real evidence of not just a God, but of anyone else but myself, that I must be the only really important thing in my life. So I set about living for myself, and only followed whatever rules I didn’t feel that I could get away with breaking. If I could break them without consequence, to get or do something that I wanted, I would do it. Why not, if there was nothing higher than myself to judge me?
So when atheists tell me they can be moral without God, I know they simply haven’t followed their philosophy through to its logical conclusion. They are still restraining themselves based on their social conditioning, or some other remnant of their previous non-atheist thinking.