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DCP has claimed that without God, mankind would be adrift with no moral bearings.

Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock wrote of the Pokanoket tribe the Pilgrims encountered, in a December 11, 1621 letter "They are a people without any religion, or knowledge of any God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just, the men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles... ."

How could this be? A people without any religion, or knowledge of any God be trusty, be just?

It defies the wisdom and claims of DCP.

In juxtaposition to Simple Dan, Dan McClellan has a recent video on this:

Dan McClellan wrote:Everyone's morality is actually based foundationally on the exact same thing. That would be our evolutionarily and experientially installed intuitions about right and wrong, our feelings. And that foundation then interacts with our socialization, our learned experiences and our critical reflection or our reasoning. And that process of negotiation then generates a developed or a systematic morality or moral outlook.

We also base your morality on how we feel. We have just been socialized and conditioned to imagine that God is the one curating that. But ultimately, just like all humans, our morality is founded on evolutionarily and experientially installed intuitions about right and wrong. We would like for our morality to be based on something transcendent and authoritative and objective. And that's simply not the case. There is no such morality. All humans are unfortunately confined to the limits of our cognition which again build on the foundation of intuitions or feelings.

Morality will always be negotiable. Now, synchronically, diachronically, we can get very close to absolute unanimity regarding certain moral principles. So it may feel like they are objective and inviable and transcendent, but they are not. It is always negotiable. The Bible does the exact same thing. The retreat to God as some kind of objective moral standard fails to distinguish itself from the negotiable morality that theists reject as not good enough.

https://youtu.be/8wiY9F0gJWA

A short reading list for DCP to educate himself:

Moral Psychology Volume 2
The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Conscience
The Origins of Moral Intuition
Patricia S. Churchland

Moral Judgements as Educated Intuitions
Hanno Sauer

An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion
Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture
Claire White

Elements of Moral Cognition
Rawls' linguistic analogy and the cognitive science of moral and legal judgement
John Mikhail

Morality for Humans
Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science
Mark Johnson

There are or at least have been times when groups of people have slid into some pretty distorted moral beliefs. Naziism would be an example. Some like cannibalism may not erase all moral sense but can continue to burden a society.

huckelberry wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 08, 2025 5:22 am

There are or at least have been times when groups of people have slid into some pretty distorted moral beliefs. Naziism would be an example. Some like cannibalism may not erase all moral sense but can continue to burden a society.

Naziism used "God" as a tool and encouraged belief in a supreme being to shore up discipline. "Gottgläubige" (God-believers). For example, Himmler tried to instill this with the SS members to keep them in line. Sure, Naziism feared organized religions such as Catholicism, but that was likely one institution (the Third Reich) trying to stave off the counter-influence of the Pope and cardinals.

As you say, Naziism slid into some pretty distorted moral beliefs. Organizations can cause otherwise good (moral) people to do atrocities. Most if not all organized religiouns have their histories with instances of such.

But as with Winslow and the Pokanoket tribe the Pilgrims encountered, there is morality sans "God."

sock puppet wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 08, 2025 3:12 pm

huckelberry wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 08, 2025 5:22 am

There are or at least have been times when groups of people have slid into some pretty distorted moral beliefs. Naziism would be an example. Some like cannibalism may not erase all moral sense but can continue to burden a society.

Naziism used "God" as a tool and encouraged belief in a supreme being to shore up discipline. "Gottgläubige" (God-believers). For example, Himmler tried to instill this with the SS members to keep them in line. Sure, Naziism feared organized religions such as Catholicism, but that was likely one institution (the Third Reich) trying to stave off the counter-influence of the Pope and cardinals.

As you say, Naziism slid into some pretty distorted moral beliefs. Organizations can cause otherwise good (moral) people to do atrocities. Most if not all organized religiouns have their histories with instances of such.

But as with Winslow and the Pokanoket tribe the Pilgrims encountered, there is morality sans "God."

Ritualistic cannibalism was also a religious practice. Gott Mit Uns (God be with us) was inscribed on Nazi belt buckles. In short there are horrific shifts in societies on both sides of the religious regimes.

There can certainly be morality without any particular religious belief. I'm not sure any morality is so objectively obvious that it requires no assumptions comparable to religious faith. Kant tried to get there with his Categorical Imperative, but even if you buy the CI, it's a meta-rule that allows horrible morality as long as it's equally horrible to everyone, so to me it mainly shows that if you want a decent morality then you're going to have to go out on a limb and postulate something. If all you want to do is declare atrocities wrong, though, then you surely don't need to postulate as much as most religions require.

On the other hand, often a detailed story is more compelling to people than a minimal set of axioms. People may be more willing to rein in their worst impulses because your descriptions of Hell and Heaven are vivid than because your logical morality only asks for weak premises.

The fact that great crimes have been committed in the name of belief systems, as well as heroically altruistic acts, shows that logically demanding axiom lists really can have a lot of moral effect, for good or for bad. People who argue that religion can be useful as a basis for morality are not usually arguing that it doesn't matter which religion you pick, any more than the people who are trying to sell you nutritional supplements are saying that anything you can fit in your mouth must be good. On the contrary, these people are arguing that your religion or diet are important and you should pick a good option, like theirs, instead of a bad one. So pointing out that bad belief systems have motivated great crimes is no rebuttal to people who are selling religion as a support for morality.

Another point: in arguing about how people derive their morality, it's pointless to point out that all human judgements are fallible and subjective. That's also true about human judgements in physics. We only understand physics up to our cognitive and technological limits, and any theory that humans endorse depends on our evolutionary and social conditions. That doesn't render meaningless the assertion that natural laws independent of human understanding exist. The fact that we can't be sure of the truth does not mean that there is no truth. On the contrary, everyone who painfully stubs their toe in a dark room can attest that objective facts can be only too real, whether or not we perceive them. The reason my toe definitely hurts so much now is precisely that that darned chair was really there all along, even though I didn't think it was there, until now.

Morality is not so readily tested as physics or obstacles in the darkness, but their examples show that uncertainty is not the same as non-existence.

It might say more about those that claim morality only exists due to God than about the reality/nonreality of that claim. For example, does DCP only reign his own impulses and actions because he fears God? Does he think, for example, that if he stopped believing, he would turn to going on a rampage of immorality? Daniel sees God as a morality crutch, without it Daniel could not 'walk' morally. Perhaps he has a dimmer view of himself than might be the reality in his case--then again, without the fear of God, Daniel might be another Jeffrey Dahmer.