This connects to Tony's point as well; while it is true that wicked rulers who have failed to live what they profess have always been a thing, it is rather novel to see that ethos be normalized throughout a society to the extent that it was in America and Europe in the late 20th century. I understand the pushback to calling this "atheism", and I would note that I first described it in this thread as "inward atheism"; they may claim whatever they want about religion, but their actions lead one to believe that they do not fear God, and that they live much the same as they would if He did not exist. I could get more to the point and call it "godlessness", if that term helps clear the air.
I'll concede that wicked rulers of old probably did, in some sense, fear God and take seriously elements of their religious faith and practice (how they managed to reconcile that with their many evil deeds is another question, but not worth getting into here) in a way that today's political class clearly does not. I do think calling this "atheism" misses the mark in important ways, in that there is a fundamental difference between the affirmed nonbelief in God and the general nihilism that pervades our political class. We could get into arguments about how postmodern nihilism is an inevitable byproduct of the loss of faith in God, and I fundamentally disagree with this notion, but even if we granted that, we have to acknowledge that they are different phenomena with a different impact. Plenty of people have had strong ideals they believed in while being atheists, and vice versa, as you say, our modern religious leaders all profess Christianity regardless of their genuine faith. So talking about having genuine beliefs in something greater than oneself is not the same as talking about the dominance of ostentated religiosity. You might argue the two are correlated in some way, but not enough to justify this conflation.
Indeed, which is why I noted to Torie that he probably would take no issue with many of the things that concern me; it is not possible to show per se that taking into account more moral foundations makes you a more just person. I'd actually go further with your post here and say that the concept of scientific morality is inherently nonsensical, but that's a different topic.
No, if I understand you right, I agree completely. To the extent that moral principles can be derived from anything, it's from metaphysical postulates, not physical ones. In other words, whatever pre-empirical postulates undergird our scientific theories might also provide the basis for our moral theories, but scientific facts themselves cannot.
