pop morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

It's very easy to understand "you people and your refusal".  God doesn't exist, and your wholly babble is a hideously evil and amoral example of badly-written mythology. Morality is a function of empathy, which most fundamentalist xtians lack in spades.  That's why the highest crime rates on the planet are found in areas that have xtian churches on every corner.  Read Elicka Peterson Sparks' recent study, "The Devil You Know".  It's quite engaging.

didn't you people loose the 'empathy' argument on page 2? In that empathy can be manipulated and can be trained in society to be felt for some and to exclude others.

This Happened with the American Indians, Slaves, The Jews in Germany, Aborted Babies etc... All Human, but all had their humanity taken from them and so too was all empathy, which made it moral to kill them in the most inhumane way.

I'm trying to figure out why you think the ability of human tribalism to erode our sense of empathy when a group is designated an "outsider" group (i.e. "Them", not "Us") is a winning argument against moral codes being universally subjective and based on empathy.

Far from being the cause of it, being taught not to follow a Great Leader's teaching about some sort of overriding "objective moral code" seems to me to be an inoculation against the sort of propaganda of which you speak. If people are already conditioned to listen to outside social/moral code programming more than they listen to their own hearts, you get 1930s-40s Germany. That's true whether we're discussing religious programming or nationalist programming.

When you say that moral behavior cannot exist without some "Overseer" telling us what to do, it tells us that you Christians (and anyone else who thinks that way) are sociopaths, incapable of doing the right thing on behalf of your fellow human beings just because it's the kind and feeling thing to do. 

Ironically, even Jesus enumerated the "Golden Rule" concept, an empathy-based moral outlook... "if it would suck for you, it would probably suck for them, so don't do it to them either".