Here are some questions for you to ponder. Suppose you're talking to someone about something that harms others, say, kidnapping or sexual assault, and you and your interlocutor both agree that actions that cause harm to others are morally wrong.
Very well, but what are you asserting when you claim that X is morally wrong? What does it mean to declare an act wrong (or right) in the moral sense?
If we say that rape or racism are wrong what are we affirming about these things? What does the term "morally wrong" actually mean? Does it mean nothing more than an act that most people don't like? If so, why is that a reason not to do it?
Does it mean that it's an act that one just shouldn't do? If so, why shouldn't one?
An act is legally wrong if it violates the civil or criminal law, but what law is violated when one commits a selfish act like refusing to help someone in need when one could easily do so or when one cheats on one's spouse? Is there an objective moral law similar to the civil or criminal law? If so, where does it come from? What is it grounded in?
If a criminal law carries no sanction, no penalty, nor holds transgressors in any way accountable in what sense is violating it really wrong? Suppose there was no penalty attached to laws prohibiting one from polluting the environment, in what sense would polluting the environment be wrong? What's the point of insisting: "But it's illegal!"?
If there is a moral law is there personal accountability for violating it? If not, how is it wrong to violate it? Who holds tyrants like Fidel Castro or Kim Jung Un accountable for ordering the assassinations and torture of their political enemies?
Even if they were in some way punished, as was Saddam Hussein, how is imprisoning them, or even executing them, any kind of just recompense for the human misery they caused? How is justice achieved when a mass murderer like Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, takes his own life after murdering dozens of others? Is justice even possible?
The problem is that in secular societies in which large numbers of people have concluded that the idea of God is no longer viable, there's no good answer to any of these questions. If there is no personal God then there is no objective moral law, there's no accountability, there is no justice, and the term "morally wrong" has no real meaning. It serves only to express our personal likes and dislikes and nothing more.
When a society eventually realizes that this is the ineluctable consequence of its predilection for being free of the God of traditional theism its members will almost certainly adopt the slogans "Look out for #1", "Might makes right", and "Anything goes" for these are the logical moral entailments of a society stripped of any ground for objective moral law.
And the next step beyond that is tyranny.
This is the trajectory many Western societies are following, apparently oblivious to where they're headed. Some of the more thoughtful members of those societies, of course, see what lies ahead, but even for many of these a return to traditional theism is too high a price to pay if that's what's necessary to avert the coming reckoning.
They'd rather continue down the road they're on and take their chances with impending moral anarchy.
