Deconversion and some doubts

[vulcanlogician]

But what if you didn't love your daughters? What if you hated them? Would you still be "obligated" not to fail them?

Yes, because I’m obligated to love them, whether I do or not.

Imagine being a child of such a father, his failing would be quite evident. “He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father.”

Yeah but that's not really how the world works. What about different scenarios?

“He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father” Smacks of social normativism and conformity. What about this? "He often didn't do an adequate job as a father, especially during those many times when he was accepting his 'Dad of the Year Award.'" Plato addresses this directly in the Republic. Book II (358e-359d).

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"They say that doing injustice is naturally good, and suffering in- justice bad, but that the bad in suffering injustice far exceeds the good in doing it; so that, when they do injustice to one another and suffer it and taste of both, it seems profitable—to those who are not able to escape the one and choose the other—to set down a compact among themselves neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. And from there they began to set down their own laws and compacts and to name what the law commands lawful and just. And this, then, is the genesis and being of justice; it is a mean between what is best—doing injustice without paying the penalty—and what is worst— suffering injustice without being able to avenge oneself. The just is in the middle between these two, cared for not because it is good but because it is honored due to a want of vigor in doing injustice. The man who is able to do it and is truly a man would never set down a compact with anyone not to do in- justice and not to suffer it. He'd be mad. Now the nature of justice is this and of this sort, and it naturally grows out of these sorts of things. So the argument goes.

"That even those who practice it do so unwillingly, from an incapacity to do injustice, we would best perceive if we should in thought do something like this: give each, the just man and the unjust, license to do whatever he wants, while we follow and watch where his desire will lead each. We would catch the just man red-handed going the same way as the unjust man out of a desire to get the better; this is what any nature naturally pursues as good, while it is law which by force perverts it to honor equality.

Note that this is not Plato's view. This is the view that he spends the entirety of the Republic arguing against.

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You aren't obligated to love your daughters, man. You just do.  And since you love them, you are bound to do right by them. That's just the way love works. But I don't think how you treat people whom you love is very much relevant to ethics. To me, the more pertinent question is: how do you treat people you hate? Or: how should you treat people you hate? You Christiany types like to say that people should love one another. And I dig it and everything, but it isn't realistic. Plus that, Christian love is an odd kind of love. Christian love thinks things like convincing gay men to enter unfulfilling heterosexual marriages is "loving" them. No it isn't.

Genuine love of a gay person usually entails wanting them to be happy and fulfilled in their lives. But that's not Christian love.

"Wear the yoke of conformity." THAT'S what "Christian love" usually amounts to. What kind of piss poor love is that? But I digress.

The question isn't whether you "ought" to be a good father. The question is: How can I be a good father? When you decide to be a good father you take on the yoke of that particular moral duty. And it has nothing to do with love or emotion. It has everything to do with what (objectively) one needs to do in order to be good at fathering. The rules for being a good father are not arbitrary. You can't just say, "leaving my children to starve in the cold is good fathering in my opinion." Same goes with morality. Morality is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact.

I agree it’s the Good that defines our goal. It is what obligates us.

The Good doesn’t exist as a pretty dress in a window which I can casually decide whether I want to put on, hence why Plato’s description involves the collective murder of the one trying to reveal it to the cave dwellers.

Exactly. I think what Plato is saying here (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) is that the group mentality is in no way shape or form a moral mentality. (Though it very much pretends to be.)
But this is yet another strike against the Christians who very often confuse the two. One may say, in the Christians' defense that they are a group like any other and should not be criticized especially for possessing the default foibles common to all groups. But! The Christians make themselves an exception. They call their herd mentality by tender names. I've known homophobic frat boys who "don't like queers." But they (at the very least) they didn't claim their bigotry was some kind of righteousness urge, as Christians often do. The evangelical Christian lifestyle is objectively immoral in many regards. It promotes hatred and violence. And what's worse, it is so sure of itself because it is based in doctrine, that it dares not question or challenge itself as far as moral issues are concerned.
I like a lot of the Christian moral imperatives, don't get me wrong. I dig the Sermon on the Mount more than you may realize. But all this immoral baggage (bigotry, hatred, violence, and coercion) that is attached to Christianity is morally wrong in an objective sense. And it bothers me to no end when Christians make bullshit claims like "you can't even have morality without God." BULLSHIT. The opposite is true.