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Originally Posted by David E
It's just amazing to me that you would put so much hope and emphasis on a hypothetical study about how people might unconsciously act on a bridge with 5 guys, when it's so obvious that whole tribes of people throughout history and today made a living pillaging and enslaving other tribes, and very consciously and deliberately act like they are in a completely different moral universe. I mean really, how do you account for the differences in Nazi and Jew, Imperial Japanese and Chinese, Muslim Palestinian and Christian Palestinian, Slave master and slave, and other blatant examples I keep pointing out?
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Easy. The fact that they bother to define themselves as Nazi, Jew, Imperial Japanese, Muslim Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, etc. For reasons too obvious to go into, humans evolved a tendency towards different "in-group" vs. "out-group" morality. Religion doesn't cause that, it does however exacerbate that. It gives people an artificial definition of who is in your group and who is out of your group, and therefore a reason to ignore the moral code that they would apply to people who they deem worthy.
Even if you accept that Hitler was an atheist (which is highly debatable), there is no doubt that religion was a categorizing tool he used to carry out his evil. There is no doubt that without relying on religious conviction and the xenophobia it creates (whether out of genuine belief or intelligent manipulation), he would never have had a country's worth of people helping him.
I won't claim that lack of religion would rectify that, but it would remove the largest source of "in-group" vs. "out of group" definition we currently have.
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Now the study might be true, that in a split second situation, there might be a common human reaction that is good or moral, but how often does that happen compared to the stuff I listed above that goes on all the time?
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\You say that the justification for continuing to promote religion is that the morality taught by religion is what has founded our society. Have you read the bible lately? Old testament or new, there are heaps and heaps of moral "lessons" in there that are appalling by today's standards. So here's the question. It seems that far from basing our society on scriptural morality, we've picked and chosen the "good" parts. We've decided to ignore the wrathful, vengeful god. We've decided to ignore the Jesus that, cult-like, asked his followers to abandon their parents. Or that, with text book in-group morality, marked only Jews for salvation.
Our morality is simply NOT based on scripture. Scripture was a heavily influencing reference book. But decisions were made as to which parts to take at face value, and which parts to ignore as allegory and irrelevant. That's the relevance of the study. It answers the question of how the heck we can possibly make those decisions, and it shows that the basis is not god, the basis is humanity.