a head choppy strategy

Hahaha. This is fantastic.

But why cant I have a preference for quality of life.

I definitely think you can. I just don't believe there is a good evolutionary argument that completely rids us of this 'nuisance' of moral realism. I responded initially to your claim that Christianity was only the ostensible reason for these preferences in society, when you're also asserting that the underlying facts doing the real work are evolutionary ones. In some ways, that could be the case. If these social organizational changes that issue from Christianity confer some kind of social benefit, say something that further downstream leads to technological and industrial supremacy, you have an evolutionary argument. I suppose you could always just discriminate between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in terms of their evolutionary strategies.

My problem is with treating the morals themselves like psychological vapors that don't track reality, but which evolutionary processes merely favored as useful illusions. Instead, I think we must treat these moral preferences not as useful illusions, but as facts of reality inasmuch as our tendency to adapt to these moral facts (or not) produces effects that evolution can act on.

Now that we are on generation 50 or 75 of Islam, what do we see?

I agree. I believe they based their lives on false beliefs, and for many reasons this has compromised their 'staying power' with respect to sustaining their cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage. In strictly evolutionary terms, they're still getting on. They're on the planet in large numbers. They outbreed us. So what they tend to do in cooperation with natural law benefits them, and what they tend to do that disjoins them from the Logos, harms them.

Cultures produce selective pressures just like physical environments.

Oh, without a doubt. In a developed world where the standard of living is sufficiently high, I'd say culture is the environment. Most of us aren't being shaped any longer by basic survival needs. We're being shaped by our ability to conform to and excel within the culture.

I find that I have some interest in what you are saying, but let me point out a couple of things.

The way that you discount language is just impossible to do and at the same time maintain any coherent philosophy of reality. You say that human reasoning is based on phenomena that are disjoint with nature itself, and therefore is unable to reveal nature's joints to us. This eliminates any beliefs based on human logic from revealing anything about reality to us, if the words in which we think don't purchase us any true beliefs.

But this literally precludes you from making any coherent statements about reality. What you use in your comment are words, and those words demonstrate you have beliefs about reality. Man does not speak in 'motion', he does not think in 'motion', so what reason have you given mankind to think he can know anything about the reality-of-motion, much less talk about it with one another?

Further, the terms 'beginning' and 'end' are indicative of something, particularly this word, 'end'. It implies a final cause, or a meaningful purpose for things. If something brought reality into motion, and all of that motion has an end, then there must be a Logos embedded in that reality, about which you can say something - that is, which ought to be intelligible to human reason.

If all that you can say is things are in motion, they are moving toward an end, and that's it, then you've not said anything meaningful besides to just say what is. Anything else you add to this scaffold will be the result of reasoning or revelation, each of which will entail language as words, ideographs, gesture-signs, etc. I can recall the long comments you've made to us in the past, featuring paragraphs after paragraphs, ultimately just to say: things are in motion. Okay, so what?

Change itself is the master key and the real underlying goal which all philosophy has meant to explain. You are coming to the table by saying there is only motion. It had a beginning, and it will end. But how are you justifying that motion had a beginning and an end - and note that I'm not referring to any particular, contingent motion of a corporeal object (as in this or that particle moved from point A to point B). No, I am asking how you're justifying that all motion had a beginning and that all motion ends. You cannot infer that conclusion by merely arriving in existence to find that everything is in motion. It's logically possible that things have always been in motion and things just always will be, and so all change is contingent on an infinite regress of motion. Of course, most of us reject this because believing that also means that you can't even properly define causes. Once you give that concept away, you can't say anything about reality beyond what you have: hey, things are moving.

@PS @KingOfWhiteAmerica @BurnInHelena