This is going to be an especially hard problem to tackle, because you have liberals that want to say morality is just a social construct, and you can't say anything is good or bad, while you have conservatives that want their morality channeled through a doctrine that's hundreds of years old.
We need to pick ourselves up from our bootstraps and say morality is tied to the well-being of any conscious system and there's a landscape where you can navigate more 'right' or 'wrong'.
I've always thought you should take care of yourself first, then help others, because that was the only way you can help people in the first place.
Perhaps there's a way of maximizing human flourishing in which we go as far as we can go and somehow train ourselves to truly be dispassionate to friends and family and just be globally concerned and not weight our children's welfare more than someone else's children. There's a thousand ways to tune the variable of selfishness versus altruism.
Some people think it's morally/emotionally normative to privilege your family members over strangers. I wouldn't want to care just as much as the stranger on the street as my family, and I wouldn't want to take as much joy in his presence as in theirs, because that would seem to somehow deflate the significance of my relationships to my family. But if you take drugs like MDMA or do meditation practices like love and kindness, you realize that love really isn't transactional or personal in any important sense, it is a state of consciousness, a state of being you can inhabit to one or another degree and in our normal mode, we only tend to get glimpses of it. When one's experiencing these states of consciousness it's not like one loves ones children less. It's possible to just throw open the gates to that state of mind, and doing that, you wouldn't see any good reason to relinquish it if you could effortlessly stay at that place.
People just want to feel like their life is important, and one way to do that (pretty easily) is to collect something that maybe another person hasn't. Then you're filled with ideas of 'I'm the first to do this' & 'I'm knowledgeable of this subject', which naturally, adds some sort happiness.
Articles like these are sidetracking the conversation that we should really be talking about. Beliefs have consequences and religious beliefs should be subjected to the same kind of conversational pressures, that we subject all other beliefs to. And this taboo that gives beliefs, in the name of god, a free ride in our discourse has to be lifted.
To attribute this to professions as opposed to what people think, seems to me to completely miss the way people behave in this world.
We need to pick ourselves up from our bootstraps and say morality is tied to the well-being of any conscious system and there's a landscape where you can navigate more 'right' or 'wrong'.