Perhaps, but if there’s no higher power, laws and rules are optional. I don’t want to live in a world where morality is optional.
So cultures that kill people for being gay, mutilate women’s genitalia, etc are moral or immoral? Who gets to decide what’s moral and what isn’t?
Nobody gets to define morality all by himself. That’s true whether someone is religious or secular.
One problem with saying morality has to come from a “higher power” is that people still have to interpret what that higher power wants. Christians disagree with other Christians. Different religions disagree with each other. Even within the same religion, people have defended slavery, segregation, denying women rights, killing heretics, and persecuting gay people as morally justified.
Who gets to decide? The question doesn’t go away just because someone invokes some random God. We still have to ask whose version of God, whose interpretation, and whose moral rules.
Of course cultures that execute gay people or mutilate women are immoral. I believe that's so because they cause real suffering, deny human dignity, and treat people as less than fully human. How do you feel about them? Is it because of a religious belief or who you are as a person? Are those things inseparable?
Morality should be judged by how we treat each other without coercion, not simply by whether someone can attach a religious justification to it.
Study history much?
“Basic human values” is easy to discuss from the comfort of modernity.
Who gets to define morality? Who gets to decide what’s moral is and isn’t moral?
Ask yourself that question. Nobody gets to define morality alone. We argue it out through reason, empathy, experience, and concern for human suffering. And if the answer is “God,” we still have the same problem: whose God, whose interpretation, and whose rules? Yours?
I've not said the bible is the foundation of morality, just that religion is. Religion has been around as long as humans have existed.
That's where we disagree. I think religion is a human creation, not the source of morality. People created religions to explain the world, maintain power, and pass on traditions. Whether any of those religions are actually true is a separate question.
Without the appeal to a higher power morality is not only malleable but it's literally up to each person / culture. No rule amounts to anything without threat of penalty.
And people wonder why I reject religion. Most people don't refrain from lying, cheating, or hurting others simply because they're afraid of punishment. They do it because they care about other people, value trust, and want to live in a society where those things matter. Fear of punishment can enforce morality, but it isn't what creates it.
Besides, if we're all just accidents then everything we do is simply the result of chemical processes in the brain, so 'right' and 'wrong' are purely subjective.
I don't see why being the product of evolution makes morality meaningless. Our brains may operate through chemistry, but love, suffering, compassion, and cruelty are still real experiences. That's enough for me to say some ways of treating people are better than others. Some may see it differently.
Will it matter a billion years from now? Certainly not. But how I treat others now matters to me (and to them). There doesn't have to be some grand design. If someone is moral only because of their religion, are they truly moral?