I feel, however, that to say because the answers aren't immediately clear that whole thing is hopeless and now we should just do whatever feels right and there are no real moral absolutes . . . that's a dangerous path to be on.

Well, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it. But for my money, it's not half as dangerous a path as saying that the "Word of God" isn't immediately clear but we should follow it anyway. Nine times out of ten, if something isn't written clearly it's because it wasn't thought through properly in the first place. Unless you're from one of those religions which claims that an infallible being dictated the whole holy book word-for-word, this is tantamount to saying that the human authors of these "Words of God" probably screwed up some bits.

Which they did, of course. It's non-coincidental, but meaningless, that popular religions have rules that (in the social situations where they were forged) strengthen societies. Of course the religions that have survived from those times do that: the religions that don't, of which there were plenty, haven't survived -- they were out-evolved by the social-cohesion religions.

It's unlikely that even Moses or Christ, or anyone else in those times, was a good enough sociologist or anthropologist to realise that that's what they were doing -- and so Judaism and Christianity didn't have to compete against any soundly anthropologically designed religions. Survival of the fittest doesn't imply survival of the perfect.

Peter