13 Questions

[Angrboda]

5. If everyone on earth believed that rape were morally right, would it still be morally wrong?
Technically, no. After all, it was OK for the ancient Hebrews to rape the young girls of conquered nations at their god's command.
But I do think that humans know, on some level, that rape is wrong. That's why most human societies abhor it. It can be possible, in certain circumstances, for a society to collectively decide that rape is fine for some people in some cases. I wouldn't want to be part of that society.

One of the conjectured mechanisms leading to rape being morally wrong is that in social groups where rape is accepted, males (in appropriately sexually dimorphic species) would end up expending resources raising offspring that are not their own at the expense of their own seed, thus diluting their contribution to the gene pool. An animal with a permissive attitude toward rape will contribute less of his genetic material to the species, and those more aggressively anti-rape will contribute proportionately more of their genetic material to the species pool. Thus, evolutionarily, alleles which are less vigilant about rape will, over time, be replaced by alleles whose individuals react strongly to acts of rape.

Note specifically though, that this does not depend on any type of reasoning or cognition on the part of the animal, it is a purely stochastic effect, flowing from the consequences of the behavior. Thus it's quite possible that other animals, perhaps many primates, are "morally opposed" to the behavior of rape. Not because they ate an apple, and became as Gods -- but because the attitude of permissiveness toward rape has literally been bred out of them.

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When you were born you did not believe in god (the same is true of everyone). You were at that time an atheist. So what changed?
looking at your posts I would say intensive indoctrination by authority figures and peers.

A few observations. First, this seems to incorporate the genetic fallacy in fundamental ways. We're not born being able to recognize the persistence of objects, that when a person goes behind a screen, they don't cease to exist. This is largely a matter of brain development, but the notion that because we are born in ignorance, that is our natural state and we should remain that way is not a plank I want in my party platform. (Roland Barthes has cautioned us to "beware the natural sign" meaning that, many times, those things which our culture communicates to us as being "natural" are some of the most artificial and politicized constructs, and the assignment of the sign of naturalness is intended to discourage examination and to avoid it being questioned.) This is quite readily seen as an example of the is / ought fallacy.

The second is that many of the most valuable things in our world are based on such mechanisms -- things such as culture (inter-personal learning, often largely driven by the "authority" of the group), authoritarian indoctrination (in both institutionalized learning and the learning that results as an outflow of the power imbalance between parents and children), social discourses based on authority (what if each day we had to make up our mind about whether the king or president's directives should be followed, or, instead of trusting the self-correcting mechanisms of scientific discourse, we felt the need to personally verify each new find before incorporating it into our world); authoritarian learning is highly useful and is not in and of itself suspect simply by virtue of the social dynamics involved.

No. Learning is good. Many of the products of learning are good. If you disagree with assertions that are claimed to constitute knowledge, by all means dispute the claims. But discounting something simply on account of it being learned is silly.