In Regards to Morality

I'll break this up into manageable chunks. I'll skip the bits where my response would otherwise have been "Okay, cool."

Thumbing through the Old Testament and seriously contemplating the concept of Hell led me to doubt that the source of the Bible was an infallible god. Its lists of capital punishments for Jews and genocides for heathen nations reflected a barbaric cultural morality unlike our own.

It should be noted that the source could have been a fallible, morally bankrupt god. I'd almost argue that a universe-creating being couldn't have any moral foundation that isn't entirely arbitrary, so it'd almost be expected (but I won't get into that here, but I'll say it does hinge a lot on how the "m-word" is defined, and depends on a number of assumptions). 

I also reject "unlike our own". We definitely have things we should be ashamed about, on a cultural level, even if we're not all guilty of it.

I initially thought it was also redundant, given our seemingly innate moral instincts and capacity for empathy. Unfortunately, reading about other ancient cultures and their creeds and customs quickly disabused me of the concept of intuitive, innate, universal morals; Aztecs gruesomely sacrificed thousands to their gods, ancient Greeks practised infanticide by exposure, Mongols intimidated their enemies by displaying severed heads, the aforementioned ancient Jews prescribed stoning for so much as cursing one’s parents or working on the Sabbath, among many others. 

I don't see these practices as disproving the existence of the "intuitive, innate, universal morals" in these examples. Keep in mind that I'm not necessarily arguing for "universal morals" - we often come to the same conclusions about things, because the environment is mostly the same. So it's "universal" by happenstance.. kind of like convergent evolution ^[1]. 

Consider the Spanish Inquisition. You have the powers at be (who immoral/corrupt people in the society tend to congregate and thrive) doing horrible, atrocious things... that doesn't mean the society at large was okay with it. Just powerless.

In many cases, the "universal morals" persist despite religious doctrines blanketing the civilization like a smog, who will justify things like human sacrifice because - as they believed - literally everyone's going to die if they didn't do it. If you interacted with these ancient people on a casual day-to-day basis, somehow, you'd probably find a lot of basics are there.

In other cases, the basic goals are present - attempting to reduce suffering and maximize well being, but because their "facts" are so off-course, they end up making extremely bad decisions about what to do. If I believe the city water supply has been poisoned, and I've been given something that I'm told is the antidote that must be applied immediately (but is actually the real poison), I'll have done something awful, even if people would agree my intentions were moral... it's just that my beliefs were wrong. History may remember my actions differently.

While most humans seem to possess the capacity for empathy, cultural normalization could apparently numb it radically, making us arrive at vastly different moral ideas based on culture and religion, and seemingly supporting the assumption that morality largely comes from one’s faith or the dominant faith of his society.

I'm not sure how this is helping your case that innate morality (and I'm using this phrase of yours, for argument's sake) doesn't exist. You're granting that it's real, but being overridden. I would have granted that up front. It's not like it's a dichotomy between "innate morality" and "religious morality", making it an either-or. 

Even what might be considered "innate morality", can have conflicts with itself. We would consider shoplifting stealing, and thus immoral, but if someone is living in a disaster area, and desperately needs some food to feed his/her family in an emergency, and the only thing available is an abandoned house/store... we'll make allowances for the morality of helping someone else. It's complex, but it always falls back on the basic principles. Now imagine this happening on many different levels from an internal dialog to politics powers.

Further, it's my opinion that religion has largely plagiarized secular morality, perverted it, and then attempts to enforce it back on the people it originally stole it from. So it's less that morality comes from one's faith, as much as the morality comes from one's faith, that came from the people and their mixed backgrounds, that came from a mixed background of faiths, that came from the people with even more mixed backgrounds... and so on.

 I don’t know where my own empathetic moral instinct ends and the Christian moral precepts I was taught begin, 

To me, it's not particularly relevant, and that's because I/we try, to the best of our ability to validate and correct. Sometimes Christian teaching gets its right... sometimes kind of right.. and sometimes horribly, horribly wrong. If you've assessed this as such, you've probably employed your secular morality. 

It's not about keeping score - it's about diagnostics and maintenance as an ongoing process. The focus veers away from "how did we get here?" towards "where are we now, and where should we go?" (you might infer that I don't believe in unchanging absolutes here, and you'd be correct)

and I’m wondering if religion, particularly the modern Christian faith, is a necessary evil in its capacity to shape humane moral values, even if indeed false and fallible. 

That's easy - no. Why would it be necessary?

You could use a rock as a hammer. It'd be crude, inefficient, bend a lot of nails, etc... but there's no reason to think it's necessary.

I (and I'm specifying my personal views here, as they may more controversial) fully reject the idea that Christianity is any source of "human moral values", and it gets back to that plagiarism. I think most Christians skip over the vast bulk of Christian teachings, because they've applied their secular morality to assess it. So what's left is their secular values echoed in the voice of the Bible. 

It's essentially cutting out individual words from Shakespeare's Hamlet, and re-assembling them to write out a passage from an encyclopedia entry about nuclear fusion, and then claiming that Shakespeare is the source of fusion reactor engineering knowledge. 

I don't see how someone, with any kind of consistency, could argue that we need the Bible to shape moral values, while heavily trimming away 99% of it as horrible at worst - dubious or non-applicable at best. Clearly, there's some other process happening there.

Saying it's "fallible" is putting it lightly. 

I wonder if Christianity does indeed underlie modern Western morality, as the conservatives smugly assert.

It depends on what you mean. When you have Evangelical Christians in political power, they're often not shy about expressing about how they'll legislate their moral views.

But if we're talking about me personally, for instance, no, there's not a single moral value I hold that I'd say has its basis in Christianity. Even the premise of "I think this is moral because of the teachings of ..." is an amoral structure and process. That's not morality. That's just blind obedience to "someone said ..."

Although I’m not going as far as to attribute the abolition of slavery to Christianity itself, like pastor Hans Fiene and his ilk; while the Christian abolitionist movement played a huge part against it, Christian pro-slavery advocates also kept it alive for a while, both sides citing a Bible that does not openly condemn slavery itself, but rather the unauthorized kidnapping of slaves outside of conquest or legal slave trade.

I'd go further than that. The Bible condones it. Exodus is essentially an instruction book on how to do slavery. The New Testament says "slaves obey your masters" (Colossians 3:22) - while conspicuously never saying "all masters free your slaves unconditionally". It's as casual being a "Slavery for Dummies", as your car manual describes how to use the all-wheel drive.

So what we had was people employing secular morality to dismiss the parts of the Bible that condoned slavery, focusing on the secular-morality-approved passages that could argue against it... to argue against those who were weren't cherry-picking the book.

Ultimately, I just want to know where Western morality comes from, and if humans can have the same morals without Christianity. Thank you for reading this lengthy comment.

Of course it's your prerogative to wonder that. To me, it's sort of a pointless effort... like wondering where the molecules of water in your cup came from - impossibly difficult to trace back, but probably their histories are scattered all over the planet and solar system. Does it matter?

I'm more interested on whether it's clean and uncontaminated - and independently verifiable as water - than whether it was handed to me by a Christian or not.

People may argue that Christianity is needed for clean water to be possible, while not giving any good evidence for it... even to the point where the claim itself doesn't makes much sense.

• [1] Convergent evolution