I was chatting a friend who's educated in Anthropology and there's a cosmic horror to the idea humans invented morality. At one point cannibalism was wide-spread but the concept of "moral qualms" didn't exist, they just ate dead people because they were hungry.

A lot of Christians (historian Tom Holland comes to mind) in more recent times have taken to defaulting to a response along the lines of "that you find this is unthinkable/implausible/against human nature is because you were raised in a (post?) Christian society and internalized its morality." If you were raised Aztec and genuinely believed that ritual human sacrifice was necessary to appease a God, would you really think it wrong? Did the Greeks and Romans leaving unwanted/deformed children outside to die of exposure or be eaten by animals think their actions monstrous?

!Catholics am I regurgitating a !r-slurs take or is this true?

In late Republican Rome, which was a relatively cosmopolitan society not paralleled until 1600 years later, there was a slave revolt. A politician and rich guy named Crassus was putting down a huge slave revolt in Italy, which took months. Another politician with a personal grudge named Pompey put it down at the last minute and took credit.

In response, Crassus had every remaining slave who participated in the revolt crucified. 12,300 of them. Along Rome's main highway, about every 50 ft. For hundreds of miles. Basically as a campaign ad. This was not regarded as particularly cruel by the Romans, just petty for going to such an extreme to make a political point.

Compassion was not considered a virtue until Christianity came along. It just wasn't a part of civilized society.

This isn't referencing modern Homo sapiens, is your understanding that Homo sapiens probably had a rudimentary system of morals?

The early hominins of the Lower Paleolithic—an era well before the emergence of H. s. sapiens—slowly gained, as they began to collaborate and work in groups, the ability to control and mediate their emotional responses. Their rudimentary sense of collaborative identity laid the groundwork for the later social aspects of religion

Archaeologists dont understand sports, hobbies and having fun so they default to "ITS WAS RELIGIOUS"

>implying the NFL doesn't hold religious significance to most americans

This outdoor arena used to be utilized for religious purposes when playing the sacrificial worship sport.

The ceremony began with a religious incantation to the Ancestor-Gods of the Empire, sometimes combined with a ceremony to the Gods of History itself and the Small minority of darker skinned Americans known as Blacks and the primacy of their lives. They were so honored as to be socially protected by all but apostates of the state religion .

Before secularism everything special was religious

Not sure if you've seen this before: https://www.jstor.org/stable/665280

Most things are made religious if they don't start out as such. Its a common way for religious leaders to make people more reliant on the church or faith body. An easy example of this is most religious holidays being originated from feast days or celebrations

>All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.

>All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.

Darn, I thought he was a charlatan.

Also isn't this largely just the story of Adam and Eve where they were shamelessly naked before eating the fruit of good and evil then become ashamed of their nakedness and covered it up after eating it. They committed the sin of immodesty due to basal instinct and when they became aware of immorality covered themselves up.

>It's not committing an immoral act to spite a moral framework, it would be committing an act out of pure basal instinct without no comprehension of morality.

This whole argument does kind of ignores that a lot of people just want to do the worst thing they can. If you wanted to scare some peasants the worst thing you could do would probably be to fry up their babies and make a stew from their wives head.