It's interesting that you connect morality to trust. Yuval Harari suggests that religious myths play that role of enabling a large population of strangers to trust each other. I say more about that and about how a mythos expresses the "brand" of a society's ethos, in the first article linked below.
I take a somewhat postmodern, Nietzschean line of prioritizing fiction and aesthetics. We're saturated in fictions (second link), from the inner monologue we tell ourselves and that we identify with as egos or personalities, to the collective noble lies to which we defer in religion, politics, and popular culture. Much of what we care about consists of stories--not the things themselves but the stories that give them meaning. That's like the matrix or the maya space of humanization that captivates us and that we weave.
Morality I try to reconstruct in aesthetic terms to get around the naturalistic fallacy. This is part of a bigger argument about pantheism, and how the aesthetic stance can piggyback on objectivity. I can give you links to follow up on that, if you like. But maybe the best link I can provide if you'd like to read more from me is the link to the categorized list of all my writings, which I keep on my old blog. That will make it easier to find articles than to page through Medium. So that's the third link below.
Regarding Buddhism, I respect the Eastern religions more than the Western monotheistic ones, but I do have some problems with the Eastern ones too. For me it's a question of the esoteric-exoteric distinction (the Leo Strauss argument about the need for subversive knowledge to be hidden from the fragile, unenlightened public). What part of Buddhism is the happy-talking salesmanship for outsiders, and what does Buddhism really entail? I don't see how Buddhism avoids entailing the illusoriness of morality. If the self is an illusion, along with the independence of every apparent object in nature, what value could any particular have? Only the interconnected whole could have value, and why should that value be positive?
I've had long recurring debates about this with another Medium writer, called Sender Spike, who defends Eastern mysticism. I posted one of those on religious versus secular enlightenment, on Medium. I see the Buddhist's goal of being content with whatever happens as being nihilistic. So the question is what mystical morality could amount to.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/map-of-rants.html
