[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by Red Slinger

I don't think you can look at a handful of years and state that anything is "very clear" as a result. The western mainstream right-wing parties still regularly and loudly claim to represent family values, etc. If we're talking about noise from the internet than I agree with your point, but I think they are different things.

It's not just "noise on the internet". If you want to be considered a morally upstanding company now, you advertise yourself as pro-gay, ethnically diverse, supportive of women's rights - it's a clear marketing win at this point, because that is where the moral authority lies in society now. Where in the 90's in a lot of corporate environments you'd be mocked and accused of being a "homo" for going to a gay pride parade, now your office might even be a corporate sponsor. I'm not saying this shift is anything but good, to be clear - I'd much, much rather have the current tenets of dogmatic ideology hold sway than the bible thumpers'. But no matter how much some Jerry Falwell wannabe touts "family values", his audience is now a niche. Still millions of people, but the balance has shifted dramatically the other way.

Okay, I'm pretty sure you're not suggesting that atheists can't be moral or have a moral code. I'm also pretty sure you're not suggesting that there is a morality woven into the tapestry of western culture that has nothing to do, explicitly, with religion. But I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

I'm trying to say that you weren't speaking coherently about morality as a subject. A moral theory is an answer to the question, "how should we act". Morality is the debate about which moral theory is correct. There is no such moral theory as "secular morality" - the phrase is so broad as to be meaningless. Nearly all moral theories you could name are independent from a belief in God. You can be a rule utilitarian and believe in a God, or not. You can be a deontologist and believe in a God, or not. You can be a moral relativist and believe in a God, or not. Divine command theory is the only one that I can think of that directly requires a belief in a conscious deity.

Originally Posted by Red Slinger

Isn't that splitting hairs, aka "the Corsi" ?

No. They're completely distinct. A political goal is a statement to the effect of, "we want our society to have feature X." That goes no ways to answering why we want that - why it's morally right that the society should have feature X.