Perhaps the two new Atheist Bibles that have just been published, from two completely different sources, may be part of such a picture.

Governed by a rational elite spoken with a mocking tone? Should we not wish all of our politicians to be the very best in the world and be influenced by the evidence of reason and of the real world?

People have children no matter how unstable, unprosperous, or violent their society is, and have often raised and praised their offspring to be the meanest SOB viking/warrior/etc. on the block.

People want their kids to be healthy, too. And they’ve spent money on charms, made offerings to gods, and applied leeches in pursuit of those goals.

Over time, we’ve learned better ways to ensure the health of children, though.

The Vikings, Athenians, Mongols, and so forth did what they thought was necessary to protect and provide for their kids, too. They figured that involved being more violent than anybody else.

Heck, to a large extent, the people they warred with weren’t ‘anybody’ to them. The “in-group” – the set of people that really count for moral purposes – has fluctuated throughout history. In the earliest past, it may have been as limited as “the male members of my tribe”. It certainly didn’t include women as full persons in their own right – consider how recently women acquired the right to vote in the United States, and how many countries do not have full legal equality for women today. Slaves didn’t count, and people from outside one’s own tribe (and then city, and then country, and then ‘race’) didn’t make the cut either. To a large extent, the increase in general moral behavior described by Pinker and others is a record of the gradual expansion of that ‘in-group’ to encompass more and more people.

But the point remains that, however the in-group is defined, so long as it is composed of humans certain basic strategies will be necessary to manage it. And just as engineers keep finding better ways to organize materials and energy for human purposes, we keep finding better ways of organizing societies as well.

If the only reason you are moral is because it is rational for you to do so, then you will stop being moral the minute it no longer seems rational to you.

Yup, as soon as human nature fundamentally alters and the laws of physics no longer apply, I’ll change my tune. Reed in the wind, that’s me.

The problem, of course, is that morality exists precisely because we cannot always have perfect information. Morality is what protects us during times of uncertainty. It would not be necessary if perfect information were always possible.

Exactly.

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” – Damon Runyon

That’s the nut that game theory was built to crack – multiple agents with goals, in situations with varying degrees of information. And they keep finding that strategies that are nice, non-envious, and retaliatory but forgiving do really well over the long term.

What you choose to believe about abortion is quite irrelevant.

The word “choose” is what is relevant. You can “choose” whatever moral position you want.

If the only reason you are moral is because it is rational for you to do so, then you will stop being moral the minute it no longer seems rational to you.

The problem, of course, is that morality exists precisely because we cannot always have perfect information. Morality is what protects us during times of uncertainty. It would not be necessary if perfect information were always possible.

And atheists have already proven

The Mongols did not want to raise children?
The Athenians did not want to raise children?
The Romans did not want to raise children?
The Aztecs did not want to raise children?
The Vikings did not want to raise children?

Their societies were not especially non-violent. “The strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

(And lest we forget: The Europeans who lined the boulevards and cheered in 1914 as their men marched off to war…)

I suppose “prosperous” could be variously defined, but consider the Digger Indians, among others. Throughout most of history, the prosperity went to the upper classes, and the rest made do.

I think you may be confusing modernist bourgeois sentiment with human “nature.”

People have children no matter how unstable, unprosperous, or violent their society is, and have often raised and praised their offspring to be the meanest SOB viking/warrior/etc. on the block. “Come back with your shield or on it!” Spartan mothers told their sons as they marched off during the annual campaigning season. Roman matrons undoubtedly said something similar when the wildly-garbed priest came dancing out of the Temple of Mars and threw the ceremonial spear in the direction the legions would march that year.

If you reject the sacred, there’s nothing that holds you to any moral code.

If you don’t want to win the chess game, there’s no reason not to sacrifice your queen at the beginning of the game, either.

But my point is that, for a very broad range of human desires – certainly the ones that actually promote one’s own happiness – there are fundamental strategies that emerge. And lo and behold, they match what we see in the ‘natural law’ and the fundamentals of practically all cultures.

Heck, even sociopaths find it necessary to cooperate most of the time. And when they don’t… well, you could have read this if you’d gone to any effort, but apparently the mountain needs to come to Mohammed:

How about a Stalin, someone who can take over and dominate an entire country for decades? One who can ‘get away with’ riding roughshod over anyone, or any group, who dares oppose them? What, if anything, constrains them? Why should they care about the kind of morality that the vast majority are concerned with?

I’d like to relay a story I first read during the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

When one of the most secure and luxurious of his palace-and-bunker complexes was completed in 1984, at a cost of $70 million, Saddam Hussein moved in right away. But even protected by enormous layers of concrete, sand and steel, behind zigzag corridors and blast doors made to withstand a Hiroshima-size explosion, and guarded by men who knew they’d have to be ready to die for him, or be killed by him, Saddam apparently could not sleep.

“All night long he heard a sound like the cocking of a pistol,” remembers Wolfgang Wendler, the German engineer who supervised the project. Wendler was summoned by angry officials to find out what was wrong. He discovered a faulty thermostat.

Saddam, of course, deserves no pity. But this is the kind of life he led – literally jumping at shadows, because there was no one he could fully trust. Stalin became so suspicious of doctors that later in life he refused their treatment and consulted with veterinarians instead. These dictators had plenty of purely material comforts, but in the process of acquiring them they’d given up any chance of enjoying them untroubled by fears of assassination, let alone the pleasures of sharing them with loved ones. They could literally never afford to fully relax. Perhaps there are a few individuals for whom that would be worth the trade, but I wonder if they ever regretted the situations they’d locked themselves into.

This is an example of why morality is so fundamental: there are inevitable costs for violating it, particularly on a massive and regular basis. People are a diverse bunch, and there do exist sociopaths that might not mind (or even notice) those costs, but that doesn’t mean the costs aren’t there.

As I said earlier: the abortion debate really sums it up. If you’ll justify killing babies – especially in the way these babies are killed, and for the reasons these babies are killed – you’re capable of anything.

I’ve seen no evidence you actually grasp my position on abortion yet – quite the opposite, in fact, as I’ve pointed out before. I’m really not sure who you’re arguing with here, but it’s not me.

If you reject the sacred, there’s nothing that holds you to any moral code.

As it happens, nobody really rejects the sacred. Everyone holds something to be sacred.

But atheists can’t afford to be honest about just what it is they genuinely hold to be sacred. Not even with themselves. Especially not with themselves.

So they cherry-pick. But the thing is, there’s no reason for them not to. There’s no logical reason why they shouldn’t just change the definition of what is or isn’t moral based on whatever suits them.

As I said earlier: the abortion debate really sums it up. If you’ll justify killing babies – especially in the way these babies are killed, and for the reasons these babies are killed – you’re capable of anything.

If there is no fixed point of reference for a shared consensus, then there will be no shared consensus.

But there are fixed points. Things like like the nature of humanity, the nature of the universe we inhabit, and mathematical truths such as what can be found in game theory.

Let’s say you want to raise children. That means you want a stable, prosperous society with little violence.

Let’s say you want to just enjoy yourself and don’t feel like having kids. You still want a stable, prosperous society with little violence.

There are some fundamental strategic rules of chess that all strategies have in common. Different schools of chess theory focus on things like control of the center, or a focus on material… but all of them contain elements like “don’t sacrifice your queen early in the game except for massive advantage”.

Similarly, there are ‘forced moves’ in the way humans relate to each other. At least the Silver Rule, and even better the Golden Rule, for example. Chess strategy has developed over the centuries, and so has ‘moral engineering’. Slavery was an improvement over wholesale slaughter of conquered peoples. The Geneva accords – and even more, the Marshall Plan – were improvements over slavery.

Pinker shows that we’ve gotten better and better at living together and not killing each other, or even being as cruel to each other, over time.

There can only be what you want and what I want, and the strongest wins.

On what basis do you rule out cooperation as a possibility?

This omits a few relevant variables.

Your comment omits any examples of said variables.

On what basis do we decide they are “immoral”?

If there is no fixed point of reference for a shared consensus, then there will be no shared consensus.

If the fixed point of reference is arbitrary, then there’s no reason why anyone has to respect it: it has no legitimacy.

If nothing is sacred, then there can be no morality. There can only be what you want and what I want, and the strongest wins.

This is why the New Atheists are adopting religious language and starting to enforce “articles of faith” – even at the expense of the critical thinking and rationality they say they prize so much.