From atheism to tentative agnosticism

[pocaracas]

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I also wonder why you call this argument painfully obvious, yet you have spent all your life being an atheist up until fairly recently.

Well, because I didn't say that, did I? What I claimed was painfully obvious was the distinction between moral phenomena and morality itself. It is painfully obvious to me and always has been. Confusing moral sensations and beliefs for morality itself is as foolish as confusing beliefs about a chair with a chair. This doesn't stop people from making such foolish mistakes. Indeed, this seems to be 'the' major mistake that most people make when they start trying to figure out what morality might be. Rather than focussing on morality, they give historical accounts of the development of our moral sense and so on (and thereby assume they are giving an account of morality - when they are doing no such thing).

Anyway, what morality 'is' in itself is not obvious and I have never claimed it is. I have, by thinking about the matter carefully, come to the conlusion that there is only one thing morality can be, and that is the instrtuctions of a god. That is not through ignorance of other options. But I find the other options to either fail to capture the instructing nature of morality, or they capture that feature but fail to capture its rational authority. I know of no other way than mine of capturing both fetaures at once, and I think both features are essential. But it isn't obvious that morality consists in the instructions of a god. It takes careful reasoning to see it if, that is, it is true.

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Let's see if I can make sense of what's going on...
You say there are two things:
- moral sensations and beliefs: what each human tribe perceives as its guiding moral compass
- morality: An extra-human source of the moral rules.

It's like (strawman time!)
- Mathematics: An extra-human source for the rules of algebra.
- Algebra: humanity's attempt at solving mathematical problems.

Back to morality... if my understanding of your words is half right, you're defining something as extra-human and then coming to the conclusion that it can only be from a god.
To me, the problem lies in the definition.
If morality is extra-human and horizontal, that is the same for every human society at every time instance, how can we explain that for some very large periods of time, whole societies considered moral something that we nowadays consider immoral? (eg: slavery, child labor)
How can we think that nowadays human morals are the correct ones that this extra-human entity is imbuing into us?

No... it seems that human morals are genetically passed traits that enable us to live in communities.... like lions, wolves, ants, bees, etc... genetic information can provide us with such an inbuilt tendency of behavior. Of course, some people have faulty genes, leading to faulty behavior.... in theory, leading to banishment from the society and not passing on those faulty genes... in practice, it's complicated.
Then we have the instinct for survival and plain old greed to deal with and which would crumble the whole moral building.
So, along with the genetic rules (which, most likely, basically boil down to the golden rule) we have other agreed upon rules in society: the law. These are very mutable and proof of that is that each country has its own law which differs from every other country.

As with many other features of humans, each person's morals end up being a mix of genetic predisposition and rules imposed by the society to which that person belongs.
As far as I can see it, no god is required... unless you're stuck with the perception that your very human ruler is a god.