pop morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Pop morality is what a given region or generation thinks is moral... So the morality in 1940 germany is one form like the morality in 1940 america is another verse 2016 america.

My question asks which one is right, and how do we know we haven't slipped past the evil of 1940's Germany

Well if I direct my inate empathy at to this question I find that the treatment of the jews and others would make me feel uncomfortable. Empathy is a part of most people without mental disorders. It can be subverted by propaganda. Equating the jews to lesser beings such as "rats" was common in the Third Reich to try and separate them from deserving of empathy. you can see the same propaganda today being used by the right against migrants and muslims. the migrants are a "swarm" (a term usually used for insects) etc.
I would say that it is easy to see that my morals and the morals of the majority here are better than the 1940s NAZI regime. I can't say the same for the religious right, who seem to be right there with the old guard, clinging to their prejudices and hate.
I say again the early part of this century is looking a lot like the early part of the last century. only this time the evil demagogue looks like it might be a US thing, Trump scares me.

QFT!

For a famous example of how  morals are subverted by propaganda (and our chimanzee-tribe evolved psychology), look at the "deference to authority" studies done by Stanley Milgram, et al.

http://www.amazon.com/Obedience-Authorit...006176521X

http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct04/goodbad.aspx

"In fact, the classic electric shock experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, PhD, showed that when given an order by someone in authority, people would deliver what they believed to be extreme levels of electrical shock to other study participants who answered questions incorrectly.
Zimbardo said the experiment provides several lessons about how situations can foster evil:
Provide people with an ideology to justify beliefs for actions. Make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with a minor, trivial action and then gradually increase those small actions. Make those in charge seem like a "just authority." Transform a once compassionate leader into a dictatorial figure. Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules. Relabel the situation's actors and their actions to legitimize the ideology. Provide people with social models of compliance. Allow dissent, but only if people continue to comply with orders. Make exiting the situation difficult.
Particularly notable, Zimbardo said, is that people are seduced into evil by dehumanizing and labeling others.
"They semantically change their perception of victims, of the evil act, and change the relationship of the aggressor to their aggression--so 'killing' or 'hurting' becomes the same as 'helping,'" he said.
For example, in a 1975 experiment by psychologist Albert Bandura, PhD, college students were told they'd work with students from another school on a group task. In one condition, they overheard an assistant calling the other students "animals" and in another condition, "nice." Bandura found students were more apt to deliver what they believed were increased levels of electrical shock to the other students if they had heard them called "animals."

Sound like religion to anyone else? Label your enemies "sinners", "apostates", "infidels", "perverts", etc.

It angers me to see atheists compared to Hitler, since as far as I can tell, Hitler and Lenin simply took their cues for building a social power structure directly from religious methodology.