I find much to criticise in this OP and will attempt to do so without flaming.  I will even refrain from denying the meaningfulness of the concept of god.  Despite the title, the OP is apparently arguing for the superiority of a god-based code (there is no 'pondering' given to any other moral code than his own).

A great deal of this is built on limited knowledge, false assumptions and false oppositions.   Take the Mencken quote.  "The one is a Christ-like life on Earth and the other is a place at the right hand of Jehovah in the hereafter"  To anyone surveying the christian societies, a christ-like life is the last thing to be striven for.  If a single person achieves an ideal of self-sacrifice and service of others, that person is made a saint.  The goal of infinite chorister is riddled with contradictions and fuzziness - and is apparently only used as a sweetener for the civilising aspects of the moral code.

But the commentary from inquisitive idiot is equally bound up in ill-defined concepts and connections.  To begin with, are we to be considering a separate cultural stream that does not have a Judeo-Christian morality (which has not, of course, been defined - lets assume we mean the ten ommandments plus the golden rule) word for word, and does not have the Judeo-christian god?  Or are we considering a post-Judeo-christian society which has 'shed' (lovely old-fashioned biblical term!) some part of its background myths?    Now of course "We could predict that, out of necessity, another effective and communal moral code ":  almost the definition of a society is that it has a set of shared values and conventions.  A pride of lions has a 'moral code'.  But then we start to get a little confused between explaining the superiority of the Judeo-christian code and the power of a vengeful father meme (VF).   The crux seems to me to be the question "could a society survive and excel with no semi-permanent morality in place?"   The OP has some assumptions here that probably need to be unpacked.

Instead of the mythical, undefined 'Dionysian' society that the OP refers to, take a group of people that have lived togther for a long time and have had wildly varying 'moralities', none of which have included a supernatural VF-meme.  This group is now the most populous on the planet, and has consciously decided (if a society can do so) to change its approach to the world yet again.  Amazingly, this group can trace a continuous history back 4,000 years (+/-), and yet - surely to the further amazement of the OP - still people are born, live together, seek and find their happiness, are revered or ridiculed as the conventions predict, die and go peacefully to their grave.  Its survival is indubitable, and many identifiable societies can claim the same.  (Only those that have been totally destroyed by true genocide have failed to survive).  Excel?  What standards are we to settle on to define excellence?  I suspect that the OP is hinting at a material well-being in one particular segment of the Judeo-christian 'communion' - and probably carefully excluding the concomitants (the moral collateral damage).  But even using some form of cyclic reasoning - setting the standards according to those of the society one is trying to vaunt - then there are as the OP admits few societies that do not use most if not all of the conventions in the Judeo-christian code. (They will necessarily drop the first couple of commands - probably substituting some idea like 'Obey the law', 'Be a good citizen')  And each of these societies will believe themselves to be excellent examples of 'a society'.


Peace, civil order, individual happiness through the achievement of goals.  And in the long term the same for ones descendents.   The same as all human societies do.


As you see, there is a goal.  Many, in most societies.  Humans are complex creatures and it is virtually impossible for a single goal to encompass the needs and aspirations of all members.  THE goal that Mencken refers to is but one of many that his society encompasses.   And there seems to be some confusion here as well.  The 'goal' is an individual one, not a society-wide one - the whole of say the current US  generation is neither working to that goal, nor will it achieve it as a whole. 

It was an unfortunate word selection to end the post.  'Depravity' is a judgement-laden, exclusive, condemnatory term.   A serious consideration of the way moral codes work would possibly have used 'social dysfunction' or some such.  But then, would that have served the purpose of the poster?  Maybe he can tell.

To sum up.  The OP claims that the Judeo-christian code has long term survival value, and hints that it helps societies 'excel'.  He claims that this is because of the existence of a source of the code, its unchanging nature and a supernatural enforcement mechanism.   However, most societies can claim a matching longevity, even with changing codes, and naturally no 'outsider' code includes the same supernatural supports.  So the answer to the question "without this deity, could a society survive and excel with no semi-permanent morality in place?" is  "Yes"


Postscript:   Doing a bit more 'pondering' of my own.... I wonder just how we should define 'a society'.  For example, I cited China, but the obvious riposte is that chinese society X,000 years ago wasn't the same (counter-riposte 'neither was 'judeo-christian').  Do we play the OP game and pretend that the code = the society?  Yet the interpretation, implementation and consequences of the code vary considerably.  Happily we no longer stone adulterers; unhappily we covet our neighbours everything. Unhappily we honour our parents only while they can buy us the latest X-Box or Nikes, and when they are old honour them by shipping them off to communities 'where they will be happier'.
And when DOES ' a society' cease to be THAT society?  The celtic society of pre-roman britain actually continued long after the roman civis was established - it was assimilated and grounded a number of the myths of that day.  The languages survive to this day, with all the associations and connections that languages carry - some from way back, some from later days.   Are the native americans a remnant of an old society or are they a 'new'?  If so, when did the change happen precisely?      Interesting questions....

I'm also given to believing religion is a force slowing change, and without the stigma religion attaches to ideological change I would expect change to be less intense (no burning of heathens) everyone wants basically the same things and society can provide those things, and that providing those this is the goal of society, religious or secular the end is the same; peace, love, two cars in every garage and three eyes on every fish.

The challenge of defining the life and death of cultures is interesting, but since culture is a nebulous thing to begin with I'm going to share my views and be content to be disagreed with. As I understand China, traditionally Confucianism was quite popular and had temporal rules with supernatural justifications, and that was replaced at great cost by the modern atheist state which is smoothly transitioning from communist to capitalist.

Well, I can only say sorry.  I thought I explained why I thought the OP was as I guessed it was.  The gutter was there waiting to be fallen into, and I did try to keep above it.

 

Atheism being simply a strand in a very broad spectrum of belifs, I don't see how one COULD set up a value system based on it.  You can't define a complete cuisine based on not liking cabbage - a-cabbage-ism would just be a feature, rather than basis.   That was one of my problems with the OP - the suggestion that there was only one alternative to the posters orthodoxy. 

Thank you, BBW. That is one of the problems I was trying to address, though it apparently got read over by a few. What in one age is called 'evil' in the next can be called 'good'. What one person calls immoral another may think is perfectly fine. This is where it is helpful to society to place these boundaries in the mouth of a God. Of course, after a God is no longer believed in, the boundaries set forth by him are null and void, creating a gap that can only be filled by another moral code. Can atheists, having individual moral codes, create a lasting one that will benefit the entire group or will it come down to dog-eat-dog, i.e. let the weak fend for themselves.


It doesn't matter how religious they are or not, it all depends on where they get their morals from. If their parents were deeply religious and instilled a moral code into them based on their religion, even if they left that religion, they would undoubtedly still carry most of the moral ideas they were taught in youth. And to suggest that our (American) society's moral code isn't derived from Judeo-Christian thought is quite a stretch. Consider that up until only recently the 10 commandments were in nearly every courthouse.  How many prominent politicians have we had that weren't Christian? A handful?

Let me go about this another way. What do you think of 'humility'? Is it a virtue or a weakness? In Judeo-Christian thought it is one of the highest virtues, before that, it was regarded as anything but a virtue. The strong didn't need to be humble as they were strong enough to be proud. Now this isn't to say that anyone who embraces 'humility' has a Judeo-Christian morality, only that they derive part of their morality from said religion. When Christianity and Judaism are gone, humility will still be around as a virtue. Throughout history, ideas have tended to last much longer than the religions who put them forth.


That post was the quintessential 'shit' I did not want to see in this thread. But what can I say, I predicted it.

Well, I make the point all the time that we couldn't have the society we have now without Christianity, but that we don't necessarily need it to sustain our current way of living. Like you said, ideas last longer then what religion they stemmed from. That's why I think a non-religious society would work in a country that has already set it's values. I mean, we're run by theists now, and values are changing every five minutes, so obviously religion has nothing to do with keeping a society going.


Sometimes you can go a whole page before it comes up, but I guess you were just unlucky.

When bringbackwigs read my reply as assuming too much, I apologised.  My intention was as I said it. 

You may not have read the point in my original reply:



I cannot recall ever posting before the turnover.  I certainly read your post without any prejudice as to what your background views were.  If I misjudged and assumed too much again, I apologise.


Perhaps you should read a bit more of what was said.  If the tone offended, for the third time, I apologise.  However, I stand by my comments that you are unclear as to what is a society, what is a moral code, how does a moral code operate.  I also accept that I am unclear on these matters, which is why I added the postscript.  I see it as a very interesting set of questions - but not tied to the particular society you had in mind (I do not belong to your society, and share your preoccupations with it only insofar as your society affects the world in general).


I proceeded to discuss the assumptions that you apear to be making, notably: that we can identify when a society changes its identity sufficiently to say that it no longer IS that society; and that there are some standards by which we can judge a society to 'excel'.  I suggested a few of the latter, but you obviously had taken umbrage at what you assumed to be the import of my tone.  Your assumptions were as wrong as you claim mine to have been.


As I said, I offered reasons for what I said (presumably thats what you mean by 'long-winded rant') - perhaps you can offer some reasoned criticism of them. If you start with my summing up (the answer is 'yes') you may get some idea of where I was coming from.


Perhaps I should follow the example you've just given?  I have given you my apology, I hope we can leave it there.... So, shall we just put this silly little spat - and misjudgements of intentions - behind us and get on with the question?