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There are few modern spectacles more interesting than Richard Dawkins speaking warmly about Christianity.
Not converting. Not recanting The God Delusion. Not wandering into Evensong with a softened heart and a sudden interest in incense. But speaking warmly, nevertheless.
Dawkins has called himself a “cultural Christian.” He remains an atheist, which is what makes the admission interesting. He is not saying Christianity is true. He is noticing that Christianity helped form a civilization in which he could become Richard Dawkins: skeptical, eloquent, publicly irreverent, protected enough to criticize sacred things, and still culturally at home among the ruins and residues of the faith he rejects.
For a long time, many secular Westerners treated Christianity as something they had outgrown. It was old, morally complicated, often hypocritical, and associated with repression, scolding, and bad Sunday mornings. Keep the music, perhaps. Keep the architecture. Keep Christmas, provided no one gets doctrinal about it. The rest could be packed away.
There were reasons for that impatience. Churches persecuted, censored, lied, protected abusers, cozied up to power, and sometimes confused institutional self-interest with the will of God. No honest appreciation of Christian civilization can skip that part. But there is a difference between remembering the failures of an inheritance and forgetting that we inherited anything worth having.
The West was not built from one source. It is a quarrelsome inheritance: Greek reason, Roman law, Jewish moral seriousness, Christian theology, Germanic custom, common law, Reformation fracture, Enlightenment skepticism, scientific inquiry, and the long institutional habit of limiting power. Christianity did not invent every virtue from nothing, but it became one of the great furnaces in which those virtues were universalized, moralized, preached, contradicted, betrayed, and recovered.
Modern liberalism did not merely inherit Christian assumptions and put them in nicer clothes. It built institutions Christianity often resisted: robust free speech, religious disestablishment, broader suffrage, empirical science protected from clerical authority, and legal equality that went well beyond what most Christian societies were willing to grant. Some of the freedoms Dawkins enjoys were made possible by Christian moral inheritance. Others required sharp breaks from dominant Christian practice.
That tension is the point. The West is the product of argument, correction, rebellion, restraint, and institutional memory.
This is what modern secular people often miss. We imagine ourselves as freestanding moral adults. We believe in human dignity, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, care for the vulnerable, suspicion of tyranny, and the right to criticize authority. Fine. Keep all of that. But those commitments have a history. They were not produced by vibes, nor assembled last Tuesday by a committee with a land acknowledgement and a catering budget.
They came through centuries of conflict, doctrine, reform, law, blood, repentance, philosophy, institutional restraint, and exhaustion after too many people had killed each other over ultimate things.
To appreciate that inheritance is not to baptize every part of it. Christendom was not gentle. Christianity often had to be forced into better conduct by dissidents, reformers, scientists, heretics, abolitionists, and Christians reading their own scriptures more honestly than their institutions did. The West’s moral inheritance was not a clean gift. It was an argument, often conducted under pressure.
“The West is the product of argument, correction, rebellion, restraint, and institutional memory.”
But the argument happened inside a civilization shaped deeply by Christianity.
The freedom to doubt, mock religion, publish irreverent books, leave a faith, criticize clerics, and live without being ruled by priests was not inevitable. Nor was the expectation that women may walk unveiled, educated, employed, politically equal, and legally protected. These are achievements produced by particular histories, institutions, and moral restraints.
That is where Dawkins’ comparison with Islam enters the discussion, though it needs care.
The issue is not Muslim neighbours. Millions of Muslims live peacefully, work hard, raise families, keep faith privately, and want the ordinary goods everyone else wants: safety, dignity, friendship, decent schools, and a stable life. A serious argument begins by refusing collective suspicion.
The harder question is what happens when Islamic doctrine becomes politically confident and expects the wider society to accommodate its rules around blasphemy, apostasy, religious offence, sex roles, homosexuality, and public criticism. Outcomes differ by interpretation, education, migration patterns, and host-society confidence, but liberal societies still cannot survive by pretending every moral and legal order is equally compatible with liberal freedom.
Dawkins seems to understand that cultural Christianity has learned to live with disbelief in a way many religious systems have not. The Anglican church may annoy you. It may bore you. It may produce beige sermons, awkward committees, and hymns sung by twelve people spread across a nave built for three hundred. But it is unlikely to demand the state punish you for mocking it, which is not a small thing.
“But criticism without gratitude curdles into contempt, and contempt is a poor steward of anything worth preserving.”
The Sunday lesson, then, is not “become Christian or die,” nor “atheists secretly know God is real,” nor “all Muslims are enemies.” It is more modest and more useful: know where you are standing.
If you live in the West, you live inside an inheritance. You may criticize it. You should criticize it. The tradition itself contains the tools for doing so. But criticism without gratitude curdles into contempt, and contempt is a poor steward of anything worth preserving.
Secular liberalism has been living partly off inherited moral capital for a long time, even while adding real achievements of its own. Compassion, rights, conscience, equality, dissent, human dignity, forgiveness, reform, and care for the weak remained available, but the story of how they arrived became unfashionable.
A culture can run on inherited habits for a while. Maybe longer than its critics expect. But inheritance is not self-renewing, and gratitude alone is not repayment. If people are taught only to sneer at what formed them, they will not know what to keep, what to reform, what to defend, or what to pass on. If they merely admire the ruins, they become tourists in their own civilization.
Dawkins has not found God. He has noticed a debt.
The harder question is whether a civilization can repay that debt without pretending to believe what many of its citizens no longer believe.
Check it with your favourite religion/ideology. The quote has a wide range of applicability.
Jane Elliott’s famous classroom exercise functions less like an argument and more like a secular parable.
The audience is presented with a moral test. Nobody stands. The silence becomes confession. The lesson is declared revealed.
But notice what is happening structurally.
The participants are not asked to examine evidence, define terms, compare variables, or challenge premises. They are placed inside a ritualized moral frame where refusing the conclusion becomes socially dangerous. The emotional pressure is the mechanism. The audience is guided toward public affirmation through implied guilt.
That is why these exercises often feel spiritually familiar.
Traditional religion used testimony, confession, symbolic reenactment, and moral witness to move people toward conviction. Modern ideological movements often use remarkably similar tools while insisting they are merely “educating.”
The problem is not asking people to care about injustice. Serious injustice exists. The problem begins when emotional coercion replaces open inquiry.
What precisely does “treated the way black citizens are treated” mean?
Compared to whom?
Measured how?
Across what institutions?
At what time scale?
What evidence complicates the claim?
What tradeoffs emerge from proposed solutions?
Those questions are absent because the exercise is not designed to survive interrogation. It is designed to produce moral alignment.
That distinction matters.
Once disagreement becomes evidence of moral failure, accountability starts collapsing. The audience is no longer participating in an argument. They are participating in a liturgy.
And liturgies tend to react poorly when someone interrupts the ritual to ask whether the sermon is true.
One of the stranger features of modern public life is watching people who can spot religious dogma at fifty paces lose the gift the moment the dogma arrives in institutional clothing.
Put the claim in a pulpit and they reach for their Voltaire.
Put it in a workshop binder with equity on the cover and suddenly everyone is very concerned about tone.
That is not an argument against every claim made under DEI. Some discrimination is real. Some institutions have treated people badly while congratulating themselves for being fair. There is nothing strange about wanting hiring, schooling, policing, or public services to be less arbitrary and less cruel. A serious society should be able to hear those claims without flinching.
But hearing is not kneeling.
There is a difference between ordinary anti-discrimination work and the more ambitious creed that often travels under the same acronym. Widening a hiring pool is not the same thing as treating every statistical gap as proof of moral corruption. Removing needless barriers is not the same thing as teaching employees to confess inherited guilt in approved vocabulary. One belongs to public argument. The other starts looking for candles.
Religion, at least, usually admits when it is dealing with sacred things. It has altars, prayers, prohibitions, confessions, authorized interpreters, and a long memory for people who ask the wrong questions. The newer version arrives with less incense and more paperwork: forms, trainings, hiring rubrics, grant language, land acknowledgements, and small ceremonial statements read into microphones before everyone gets on with the actual event.
The room knows what is happening.
You may ask questions, technically. You may even be praised for your “curiosity,” provided your curiosity walks on a leash. Ask what equity means in practice. Ask who measures it. Ask what evidence would count against the program. Ask whether disagreement is permitted or merely pathologized. The temperature changes. Chairs shift. Someone smiles too carefully.
The comparison here is not that DEI managers are burning heretics in the town square. Scale matters. A missed promotion, HR complaint, grant denial, public scolding, or quiet reputational warning is not the Spanish Inquisition, and pretending otherwise only makes the critic sound unserious.
But mechanisms matter too. Church authorities once treated doubt as spiritual failure. Modern DEI culture often treats dissent as fragility, privilege, bigotry, or harm. The accusation has moved from the soul to the psychology, but the social lesson is familiar enough: you are not merely wrong; your question has exposed something unclean in you.
People notice. They adjust their faces. They save the real conversation for the parking lot.
That is how sacred subjects survive in public institutions. Not because everyone believes. Not even because the doctrine is especially persuasive. They survive because enough people learn the price of candour. A teacher nods through the training module. A board member lets the phrase pass. A musician reads the little ritual line because this is supposed to be a concert, not a committee war. An employee keeps the objection in his throat because rent is due and reputational damage compounds quickly.
And if DEI wants to remain in the world of policy rather than piety, it has to answer ordinary policy questions. Does the training work? Compared with what? At what cost? Does it reduce discrimination, or merely produce better-trained public language? Does it improve decisions, or teach people to repeat approved formulas while moving their actual thoughts elsewhere? Mandatory unconscious-bias training, in particular, has hardly earned the right to be treated as revealed truth. Some interventions may help in some contexts. Fine. Then test them, measure them, revise them, and stop treating skepticism as contamination.
Power has always enjoyed borrowing moral language. Traditional religion needed scrutiny for that reason. So does DEI. So does nationalism. So does environmentalism. So does any movement that claims authority over public life while placing its own premises behind velvet rope.
The question is not whether a belief is religious or secular. The question is whether it can be challenged without punishment.
What do you mean?
How do you know?
Who benefits?
Who pays?
What happens to the person who says no?
Those are not hostile questions. They are the minimum price of entering public argument. A doctrine that cannot tolerate them is not being protected from cruelty. It is being protected from accountability.
The old religions taught us what happens when moral certainty gets institutional shelter. The new secular religions are generous enough to provide a refresher course, complete with handouts, acronyms, and a sign-in sheet.
No belief gets immunity because it flatters itself as compassion.
And when ordinary people start moving their honest conversations out of the room, the institution has already chosen the sermon over the argument.
There is a moment in certain debates where everything speeds up. Morality is called subjective; subjectivity becomes preference; preference becomes power—and once power is named, the conversation is over. What began as a question about right and wrong turns into a contest of will. The move is effective because it presses on something real: if moral claims have no grounding beyond preference, it’s not obvious why anyone should follow them, especially when defection pays.
The pressure is genuine. The leap that follows is not.
The argument doesn’t stop at identifying the problem. It slides past it. The claim arrives fully formed: without objective grounding, morality collapses into power; if there is grounding, it must lie beyond human beings. From there, the appeal to a higher authority presents itself as the only way out. It’s clean, decisive—and too quick. It skips a possibility that does not depend on metaphysics at all.
You don’t need a higher power to get constraint. You need a world that pushes back. That is already enough for science. The success of a model has little to do with who proposes it and everything to do with whether it survives contact with reality. When it fails, it fails for everyone. No appeal to authority rescues it. That is objectivity without metaphysical scaffolding.
Something similar appears in moral life, though in a different register. Human beings are not abstract choosers floating above circumstance. We are vulnerable, dependent, and locked into repeated interaction with others who are very much like us. That combination exerts pressure. Cooperation is not optional if anything stable is to be built; defection carries costs that accumulate; control over outcomes is partial at best; and roles do not remain fixed. Over time, those conditions shape what can persist.
Rules that cannot be justified beyond advantage tend to fracture. Norms that work only when you hold power lose their grip as soon as power shifts. Arrangements that fail under reversal—when you are no longer the beneficiary—erode the moment they are tested from the other side. You can see this in ordinary disputes: a speech rule that feels protective when applied to your side quickly feels suppressive when applied against it. None of this descends from above. It emerges from the conditions under which people have to live together.
“You don’t need a higher power to get constraint. You need a world that pushes back.”
This is why a simple question keeps resurfacing, even among people with no interest in philosophy: would this still make sense if I were on the receiving end? You don’t need theology to ask it. You don’t need a theory of value to feel when the answer is no. You need only to notice that positions change, that vulnerability is shared, and that rules have to survive that movement. That alone rules some things out. Not everything. But not nothing.
The familiar objection comes back quickly: if this is all human arrangement, isn’t it still just power? The answer is that power without constraint is unstable. Systems built on dominance invite resistance; rules applied asymmetrically invite defection; norms that cannot justify themselves beyond advantage lose legitimacy the moment advantage shifts. These are not floating intuitions. They are structural pressures. They can be ignored for a time. They do not disappear.
The point of the “nuke” is not to prove that morality is objective in the way gravity is objective, or that every moral question has a single correct answer waiting to be discovered. It does something narrower and more useful. It removes the claim that, absent a higher power, morality collapses into arbitrary preference backed by force. There is a third option: morality can be constructed and constrained at the same time—neither invented freely nor dictated from above, but shaped by the conditions under which human beings must deal with one another.
The attraction of higher grounding is easy to understand. It promises certainty, authority, final answers. Naturalism offers something thinner: no absolute guarantees, no universal enforcement, no resolution that settles every dispute. What it does offer is a way to sort between rules that hold up and those that don’t, to explain why some norms persist while others unravel, and to resist both relativism and coercion without appealing to anything outside the world.
Scientific objectivity does not require a perfect observer; it requires that models fail when they are wrong. Moral objectivity does not require a divine lawgiver; it requires that rules fail when they cannot withstand contact with the people they govern. That is a narrower claim than the one often made. It is also enough.
You can believe that morality ultimately rests beyond human beings. You can also see that, even without that belief, moral systems do not collapse into chaos. They bend, strain, and sometimes fail, then rebuild under pressure. They are not unconstrained—because we are not unconstrained.
And that pressure, more than any proclamation, is what gives morality its shape.
There is a reason the recent interview on TRIGGERnometry featuring Andrew Wilson has drawn attention. Wilson does not simply argue positions; he shifts the ground beneath them. In a discussion about subjective morality and objective truth, that ability is decisive. Much of his effectiveness comes not from the novelty of his claims, but from the speed and clarity with which he forces his interlocutors to confront the implications of their own assumptions.
At the center of his argument is a compressed but powerful move. If morality is subjective, then moral claims reduce to preference. If they reduce to preference, then disagreement cannot be resolved through appeal to truth, but only through assertion and enforcement. From there, the conclusion follows: without objective morality, ethics collapses into power. It is a clean chain of reasoning, rhetorically efficient and difficult to interrupt in real time, especially when opponents have not fully examined the foundations of their own views.
Part of what makes this approach so effective is that it presses on a genuine weakness in much contemporary moral discourse. Secular arguments about morality often appeal to harm, fairness, or consensus. These are intuitively compelling and widely shared, but they are not self-grounding in a strict sense. They rely on assumptions that are rarely defended at a deeper level. When Wilson asks why these principles should bind anyone who does not already accept them, the hesitation that follows is real. Moral language tends to present itself as if it refers to something objective, even when speakers explicitly deny that such objectivity exists. That tension creates an opening, and Wilson exploits it with precision.
There is, in other words, a strong version of his argument. If moral claims are entirely subjective, then their authority becomes difficult to justify beyond the boundaries of a given framework. The question “why should anyone outside your system care?” is not rhetorical; it is a genuine challenge. It exposes the gap between the way people speak about morality and the way they often ground it, if they ground it at all. On this point, Wilson is not merely performing. He is identifying a real philosophical pressure.
The difficulty lies in what follows. Wilson moves from the observation that subjective morality has grounding problems to the conclusion that it therefore collapses into power. That step is doing more work than it appears. It bypasses a large middle space in which most moral systems actually operate. Societies do not typically function by reducing all moral claims to arbitrary preference, nor do they rely on universally agreed metaphysical truths. They operate through a combination of norms, institutions, reciprocal expectations, and forms of reasoning that are neither purely objective nor wholly arbitrary. These structures impose real constraints on behavior. They shape incentives, establish boundaries, and generate predictability over time.
A simple example makes the point. Most people keep small promises—returning a borrowed item, showing up when they say they will—not because of objective moral truth, but because repeated interaction makes reliability valuable and defection costly. Over time, those expectations harden into norms that feel binding, even if their origin is entirely practical.
Underlying Wilson’s move is an assumption that if a claim is not objectively grounded, it has no binding force. That assumption is not obviously correct. Much of what governs human behavior lacks objective grounding in a strict philosophical sense. Laws, contracts, and social norms are not objective truths in the way physical laws are, yet they bind behavior effectively. Their force arises from shared expectations, enforcement mechanisms, and the long-term costs of violation. The relevant question, then, is not simply whether morality is objective, but what kinds of systems are capable of generating stable and predictable constraints on human conduct.
“Wilson doesn’t defeat morality without objectivity—he defeats weaker versions of it faster than they can defend themselves.”
Wilson’s own solution—grounding morality in God—does attempt to solve this problem by anchoring obligation outside human preference. Whether that succeeds is a separate question. It secures authority for those who accept it, but does not obviously resolve disagreement among those who do not.
This is where the conversation in the interview begins to fragment. Wilson is arguing at the level of justification: what ultimately grounds moral claims and gives them authority. The hosts, by contrast, are operating at the level of function: how moral systems work in practice and how societies maintain order and cooperation. These are related but distinct questions. One concerns philosophical legitimacy; the other concerns social viability. When they are treated as interchangeable, the discussion collapses into confusion. Wilson’s advantage is that he keeps the focus tightly on justification, where his binary framing is strongest. The hosts attempt to shift toward function, but without fully articulating how functional systems can resist the collapse he describes, their responses remain incomplete.
A more effective reply would have acknowledged the grounding problem while resisting the forced conclusion. Even if morality is not objectively grounded, it does not follow that it is arbitrary or that it reduces to raw power. Systems of cooperation and constraint can emerge from the conditions of human life itself: shared vulnerability, repeated interaction, and the high cost of disorder. These factors generate incentives for stable norms and predictable behavior. They do not eliminate conflict or disagreement, but they provide a framework within which those disagreements can be managed without constant recourse to coercion.
This does not eliminate the binding problem entirely. Functional systems explain why cooperation emerges and persists, but they do not fully answer why an individual should comply when defection is advantageous and enforcement is weak. That tension remains, even in the most stable societies.
Wilson’s rhetorical strength lies in the fact that he does not need to defeat this more complex position. He only needs to expose the instability of a weaker one. Once his opponents concede that morality is subjective without offering a robust account of how subjective systems generate binding norms, he can recast their position as preference backed by social pressure and, ultimately, by force. That recasting is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. It compresses a complicated reality into a stark alternative, and in doing so it gains persuasive force at the cost of nuance.
The result is an argument that is both powerful and limited. It succeeds as a critique of poorly grounded moral subjectivism, but it overreaches when it claims that subjectivity necessarily entails collapse into power. In practice, moral systems occupy a space between objective truth and arbitrary preference. They are constructed, negotiated, and enforced, but they are also constrained by human conditions that make certain arrangements more stable than others.
Wilson is, in this sense, asking a legitimate question. The problem is that he answers it too quickly. By collapsing the range of possible moral systems into a binary, he forces clarity but sacrifices accuracy. That trade-off is what makes him such an effective debater. It is also what limits the depth of the conclusions he draws.
This Is Not a Theology Argument
There’s a version of this argument that collapses on contact.
“Christian societies succeed because Christianity is true.”
That’s not serious. It’s too broad, too easy to counter, and it drags the discussion into theology. That’s not what this is.
This is narrower.
Modern successful societies appear to rely on a set of moral assumptions that did not arise randomly—and may not sustain themselves indefinitely once detached from the structures that produced them.
Not proof, not prophecy, but rather… dependence.
Name the Structure, Not the Institution
When I refer to “Judeo-Christian ethics,” I’m not talking about the historical behavior of churches or states. That record is mixed at best and often indefensible. It doesn’t need rescuing here.
I’m pointing to a moral architecture—a cluster of ideas that shaped behavior long before belief began to fade:
- intrinsic human worth
- moral equality beyond tribe
- limits on power
- individual responsibility
- restraint
- forgiveness over vendetta
These now feel obvious.
They weren’t.
What looks like baseline morality is often inherited structure—and inheritance has a way of disguising itself as inevitability.
Christianity Is Not the Only Path—And That Matters
If the claim were simply “Judeo-Christian societies do better,” it would fail.
There are Christian-majority countries that struggle. There are secular societies that thrive. There are atrocities carried out under religious banners that no serious reader will ignore.
And then there’s Japan.
Japan is not a counterexample. It’s a correction.
It demonstrates that similar outcomes—order, trust, cohesion—can emerge from entirely different traditions. Which means the key variable isn’t Christianity itself.
It’s something deeper.
Japan suggests the underlying requirement is not a specific doctrine, but a sufficiently internalized system of obligation—whether grounded in universal dignity or social duty. The forms differ. The function is similar: behavior is constrained before enforcement becomes necessary.
Not all structures are interchangeable. But high-functioning societies tend to converge on systems that reliably produce restraint, accountability, and continuity across generations—however they justify them.
These systems are not immune to strain. Japan’s own pressures—aging demographics, declining birth rates, and shifting social norms—suggest that even deeply internalized frameworks are not static under modern conditions.
What These Systems Actually Do
Strip away the language and look at function.
These frameworks tend to produce:
- higher social trust
- delayed gratification
- stable family structures
- informal accountability
- expectations that limit the use of power
These are not abstract outcomes. They follow from repeated behaviors:
- when restraint is internalized, fewer actions require enforcement
- when accountability is expected, trust rises and transaction costs fall
- when power is seen as limited, institutions stabilize rather than dominate
Over time, these behaviors compound into systems that rely less on coercion and more on expectation.
That sounds mundane. It isn’t. It’s what makes large, complex societies livable.
None of this requires belief.
But it does require internalization.
And internalization is slow, uneven, and difficult to rebuild once it thins out.
The Enlightenment Didn’t Start From Zero
The Enlightenment didn’t sweep this away and replace it with reason.
It reorganized it.
It challenged religious authority, formalized rights, and built institutions that still define modern life. That’s real progress and it shouldn’t be minimized.
But it did not begin from moral zero.
The assumptions were already there—about equality, dignity, and limits on power. The Enlightenment clarified and extended them. It did not generate them out of nothing.
The harder question is whether reason alone can reproduce the same depth of commitment, especially when those commitments become costly.
Reason is excellent at organizing systems. It is less reliable at compelling sacrifice—and societies eventually run into situations where something has to give.
The Problem Friedrich Nietzsche Identified
Nietzsche is often invoked carelessly. This isn’t that.
His point wasn’t that religion should be preserved. It was that removing it has consequences that don’t show up immediately.
You can discard a system and keep its language for a while.
You can keep its assumptions even longer.
What you can’t do indefinitely is treat the foundation as optional while expecting the structure to remain stable.
That process doesn’t announce itself.
It drifts—and by the time it becomes obvious, it is usually well underway.
Drift Shows Up as Substitution
Drift doesn’t look like collapse.
It looks like substitution.
As informal norms weaken, societies compensate with formal mechanisms:
- more regulation
- more surveillance
- more litigation
- more explicit enforcement of what was once assumed
That shift isn’t inherently catastrophic. In many cases it works.
But it changes how order is maintained. It replaces internal constraint with external management—and that trade is rarely free.
You can see it at the margins: rising regulatory density, increased reliance on formal compliance systems in workplaces and institutions, growing legal mediation of disputes that were once handled informally. These trends have multiple causes, but they share a common feature—behavior that once required little enforcement now requires more of it.
The Secular Case—and Its Limit
A secular answer exists.
We can justify these norms through reason, reciprocity, and shared interest. We don’t need theology to understand cooperation or stability.
And in many cases, this works. High-trust secular societies demonstrate that norms can be transmitted without widespread religious belief.
The question is not whether this is possible.
It clearly is.
The question is whether these systems are fully self-sustaining over long time horizons, or whether they depend—quietly—on inherited assumptions that become harder to justify as those assumptions lose coherence.
That dependency is easy to miss because it feels like common sense.
It isn’t. It’s memory.
If these systems are fully self-sustaining, we would expect high-trust, high-restraint behavior to remain stable even as the underlying moral frameworks continue to thin. If they are not, the pressure will show up first at the margins—in declining informal trust, rising enforcement costs, and increasing reliance on explicit rules to maintain baseline order.
What This Argument Is—and Is Not
This is not an argument for belief.
It’s an argument against pretending we’re starting from nothing.
Societies that function well do not run on law and incentives alone. They rely on internalized limits—on what people will not do, even when they can.
Judeo-Christian ethics provided one version of that in the West. Other civilizations developed their own.
The open question is not whether we can discard those frameworks.
We already have.
The question is whether we understand what they were doing well enough to replace them—or whether we are still relying on them while insisting we are not.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Removing a foundation does not collapse a structure immediately.
It exposes, slowly, what the structure depended on—and whether we’ve mistaken inheritance for design.
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