>Dragan,
>
>Are you saying that humans are intrinsically moral? I disagree.

No. The morality is something each human society builds for its own survival. It's a civilizational thing. So individual humans are not necessarily moral, but homo sapiens as a zoon politikon, regularly creates morality out of the social experience. The mores of any particular society are local and last as long as that society does, and they do change with time ("O tempora, o mores!"). Some kernel of this whole corpus of written and unwritten rules tends to be more or less the same across societies.

Note that I haven't mentioned religion anywhere in the previous paragraph. A religion may uphold the morality of the times and society, or may try to sway them this way or other, or may try to prevent a sway.

>From the casual cruelty seen in every schoolyard to celebration of wealth accumulation while some across town are in abject poverty, it does not seem that humans are naturally moral or good.

Moral, as I said, is a society thing. As long as the society tolerates such people or phenomena, they will exist and be within the boundaries of current morality.

>Most religions recognise this and advocate that we must strive to be moral. I can't see how any religion can be seen to claim a monopoly over morality if "belief" includes the idea that we are sinners and need to strive always to behave morally. That isn't a monopoly, it matches fairly well with the observed reality.

http://www.reformed.org/webfiles/antithesis/v1n2/ant_v1n2_curr1.html
http://www.gospeloutreach.net/papol.html - specially " The problem is, of course, that the unbeliever cannot reason autonomously. Without God, there would be no possibility of reason."
http://www.pbcc.org/sermons/hanneman/1330.html
http://www.obministries.org/skeptic/skeptic01.htm, "If you reject God, you are left with: Everybody can do what is right in their own eyes."

All of this is just from first page when I googled for "unbeliever moral".

I'm not saying that any religion has a monopoly on morality. But they do try. Some things I found written by their members about unbelievers rank as dirty as communist and/or anti-communist propaganda.

>And you cannot deny that those who celebrate and value selfishness are more likely to claim pride in their atheism/agnosticism than in strong religious beliefs.

I can't possibly have any statistics to confirm or deny that, and neither can you. As much as I can quote tyrants who slaughtered by thousands and then built churches (not necessarily in that order), or people who got rich by deeply corrupt deeds and were claiming to be devoted believers - you may say they did that to appease the masses, and I may as well agree. But then, among similar guys who weren't religious, you could probably pick enough of them to support your claim. Since "more likely" is a statistical category, I guess our interval of confidence wouldn't exceed 50%, which classifies this claim as undecidable, IMO.