Caleb, there is some truth to some of your claims, particularly the warnings about what some (too many!) believers do with their perceived or claimed mandates from God.
“Placing emotions, subjectivity, or opinion beyond the realm of science seems to create a dangerous situation. Then opinions are protected from scrutiny and accountability.”
This should be restated. I don’t think it is so much about us controlling the placement of all these things, but about us observing where some of them are and remain despite anything we could do. I don’t claim that everything in those three categories (emotions, subjectivity, and opinion) are all beyond science. That some of these things do prove to be beyond science is just an observed reality that is a corollary to recognizing the limitations of empirical scientific methods [which some of us see, but I take it you probably do not acknowledge]. And it definitely is not right to say that these things [beyond science] are then removed from scrutiny or accountability. They are just scrutinized or held to accountability on different grounds, be they religious, emotional, or universally motivated morality.
And on that last note, I think it healthy for unbelievers (if indeed you self-identify with that category) to be acknowledging that there is such a thing as a fairly universal recognition of some morality (even if just one!) It is the beginning of the necessary antidote to the notion that all religions are always mutually exclusive of each other and therefore can be dismissed wholesale without serious consideration --an argument that does not begin to bear the weight so many anti-theists try to put on it.
But the statements of yours that I really take issue with are these.
A naturalist ethic or morality in contrast is freed from subjective authority and opinion. The principles of fairness, reciprocity, and altruism are biologically determined and will survive without faith.
On the contrary, a purely naturalist ethic is, of all the possibilities, the most enslaved to authority and opinion. When you have divorced all ethics from any sort of basis outside yourself or your culture, then you have declared yourself (or your culture) to be the ultimate authority, and those are the hardest from which to break free. Anybody can rebel against a loving God or sacred tradition. But it takes an especially strong person to wrestle free of the crushing tyranny of your own ego once you have set yourself up as Lord. Some might even say escape from that latter imprisonment is impossible short of getting help from outside.
What society really lapses into in the absence of any higher morality outside itself is the situation tried so many (too many!) times through history. A phrase in Judges captures it well: “…and everybody did what was right in their own eyes.” I really wish very much that you were right that we would all just “default” to an obedient golden rule observance. But with all the empirical things we can observe even just from self-reflection, that hope proves to be one of the bigger failures at just about every level from historical to personal.
I know that anti-religionists strive mightily to divide history into two neat categories: all the evil done, of course, by all the religions [especially Christianity], and all the good, done either by science or proto-scientific thinkers - always hounded and hindered by their religious counterparts. But for those of us who don’t approach history so dogmatically with both our eyes closed, swallowing that modern superstition makes belief in a supernatural resurrection look like child’s play.
The fact that capitalism, communism, religion, theism, atheism, scientism, monarchy, democracy, … all the -isms we could name, including Christianity can be and have been enlisted to justify and even perpetuate atrocity is, I’m afraid, an indictment and conviction against such confidence as what you’ve expressed. I do have humanist Christian friends who may not entirely agree with me in all this if it sounds like I’m insisting that human reality is depravity all the way to the core. Genesis 3 is preceded by and does not over-rule, after all, the yet-more-primal Genesis 1 and 2. The “fall” is “merely” an overlay onto a still-very good creation. [a lot of ink been spilled on that ‘overlay’ in these here parts!] So I’m no Calvinist in that regard. But I do maintain that our universal ensnarement underneath the Genesis 3 story requires (and received!) an act from outside ourselves to begin that restoration process. Science, this is not. Nor should it ever condescend to be contained entirely within that domain. Truth, on the other hand … well, that’s what our discussion is all about.
Anyway … thanks for your thoughts that became the occasion for my ramble here.