Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Why Islam Won’t Survive the 21st Century: A Quiet Collapse" video.
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@jimrobbins3971 "We are a social species, whose chances of survival is greater within in community. Communities require kindness, empathy, sacrifice, cooperation, etc."
I am familiar with the notion that altruism has survival value for the genes. It is a rather dubious proposition. Suppose that an altruistic gene emerges. The moment an opportunity for altruism presents itself to the genotypic individual, he performs an act which reduces his chance for reproduction, and benefits everyone else, regardless of whether they have the gene or not. The deselection is gene-specific, the selection is not. To first order, this would have the net effect of killing off the gene.
If it survives to reproduce, then it may provide a selective advantage to the tribe, but only if the altruism manifested is limited to the tribe, it won't have this effect if the altruism is universal (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), quite the reverse. And even then, as it gave a selective advantage to the tribe, it would constantly be deselected within the tribe, and manifest itself in fewer offspring. No mechanism has been proposed whereby it could reasonably be expected to dominate the gene pool, globally or locally.
Some such rationalization is necessary, of course, if morality is to have a reductionist explanation. That does not make it reasonable. You may need such a notion to support your world view, but your need does not impose on the universe a sense obligation
Even if we were to suppose this construction valid. It is still not a reason to act in a particular way. If our moral notions are, as you claim, a result of random interactions and natural selection they lose their transcendent claim to objectivity and truth. They are not, to a reasonable intellect, a COMMAND, but a mere DATUM, no more worthy of our fealty than the color of our eyes or our blood type. To EXPLAIN morality along your lines, is to DEBUNK it, as a guide for behavior.
"Gods aren’t not necessary for morality."
A double negative resolves to a positive. Morality derives it's authority from the objectivity and universality of its standard. When we said the perpetrators of the Holocaust were wrong and evil, we meant that they were objectively wrong; not just that they irritated us. That's why moral societies ground morality in the Ground of Being, than which nothing is more impartial and objective.
"stems from our experience with suffering."
Not without a moral premise, it doesn't. Hitler and Stalin didn't want to be murdered. But they saw no logical contradiction in murdering others, because without the intervention of a moral premise like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"; which their world view and yours cannot provide from its own resources; there is no logical contradiction.
Protestantism created the modern libertarian west. We (Protestants) ended slavery; implemented religious freedom, political freedom, academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press FIRST, and thus caused the academic, scientific, technological, and material progress that followed; and most of the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet. John 8:32 "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
And what do you propose as an alternative? Atheism? As a basis for a moral society, that has a singularly abysmal track record. From the Jacobin Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, through the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Communist China, and the Pol Pot regime; the result of a society based on atheism has invariably been bloodbath after bloodbath. The USSR alone murdered more of its own civilians than have ever been killed in all the inquisitions, pogroms, and purely religious wars in recorded history, and they only lasted: what? 80 or so years?
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