Thanks. I wasn't reading all your other posts in this thread. I have now read your proposal for a non-religious opposition to rape.

I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code. I don't think I've stated that anywhere. To try and clarify, what I'm claiming is:

- Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!

- Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.

You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded. I'm not actually religious but find myself in the Nietzschian camp, thinking that is risky and has to be refined a bit. If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward. And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it. We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths, which is why a common American insult to the Soviets in the 20th century was to call them "godless". This is what Nietzsche predicted in "The Will To Power".

"It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general ... This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so."

OK, now we're getting somewhere. This is a Darwinian argument: that which leads to successful reproduction is moral.

The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.

"Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other"

Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.