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I'm just going to say that I do not believe you are a "former leftist and atheist who's cringing at other atheists." This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.
The rejoinder you are complaining about is indeed a certain kind of smug gotcha line that's kind of cringe, but it's a rejoinder to an equally smug and cringeworthy argument. When theists try to play gotcha like that, they invite gotchas in return. This is why atheists who've gotten over their "arguing with evangelicals" phase usually aren't interested in that kind of debate. I'm fine actually talking about why I do or do not believe in God. But the sort of Christian who uses the "How can you be moral without God?" argument (usually followed by some variant of "You don't actually believe there is no God, you're just pretending") isn't interested in genuine discussion, but in seeing who can win the gotcha contest.
I think your Lizzo/Muslim analogy is kind of ridiculous. I don't personally care whether or not Ayan Hirsi Ali really believes in Christianity, but I can see why actual believers would care if someone is just wearing Christianity as a skin suit. You are overthinking the attraction to Islam; it's been pointed out here plenty of times that the left's infatuation with Islam isn't because of any intrinsic qualities of Islam (if it were practiced mostly by white people, they'd be condemning it as a Bronze age death cult). It's purely and solely because Islam is mostly practiced by brown third-worlders.
I think in a lot of cases, that is a sincere question. Most Christians are at least nominal deontologists, with God as the ultimate judge of what is right and wrong. If that’s the only moral system you know and can model, an atheist is going to seem like an ethically unmoored individual. In that context, the question isn’t a gotcha, but indicative of ignorance of utilitarianism.
I disagree that most Christians are 'at least nominal deontologists', if only because I think most Christians do not know the word 'deontology'.
My guess would be that most Christians have a kind of 'folk morality' - they don't have explicit theories of ethics, but rather have an organic, messy series of moral convictions that they have not systematised, but which are heavily influenced by Christianity as they understand it (which depending on their tradition involves things like reading the Bible, what they learned in Sunday School growing up, what their ministers or pastors tell them, what they absorb via osmosis from other Christians, and so on).
Most Christians therefore probably endorse some strict moral rules or duties (e.g. the Ten Commandments), also endorse virtues (e.g. the Fruits of the Spirit, "let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus", etc.), and also are sensitive to consequences (e.g. "by their fruits shall you know them"). Depending on which of these things you emphasise, you can try to spin Christianity as deontological, virtue-ethics-focused, or consequentialist (of which utilitarianism is a subset), but I think any attempt to simplify it down to one of them would be misleading.
It seems more likely to me that there is no general consensus on these kinds of ethical theories among Christians. Rather, Christians as a group probably more-or-less endorse the ideas that they should follow moral rules, that they should strive to become good people, and that they should try to produce good outcomes for the world. And if you try to force them to consider edge cases where some of those principles conflict, as philosophers do in order to refine theories like deontology or consequentialism, I expect most Christians would umm and ahh and not have clear answers.
So with that in mind, what's going on with the, "How can you be good without God?" question?
I suspect it's probably just as simple as the fact that a lot of Christians regularly incorporate God into their moral reasoning. When faced with an ethical question, they ask themselves questions like what would Jesus do, or what does the Bible say about this, or they engage in practices like praying for guidance. If you do that a lot, you're from a community where that is the default form of moral reasoning, and you have very little experience with other people... well, people who don't do it are going to seem weird. Hence the question - how do you do morality, in a practical sense, without this framework? What framework do you use instead?
If there is no objective standard of morality or ethics, and if you do not have an authority from which you get such a standard, how do you arrive at: (1) sex is fine as long as all parties consent (2) women are equal to men (3) we should help the poor and needy (4) other standards which are not based on 'nature red in tooth and claw'?
It turns out to be some form of utilitarianism, and the exterior moral authority is Bentham or somebody. But Jeremy Bentham grew up in a Christian society, so the moral background to his foundation as an ethical being is derived from that, whether he knew it or not.
Basically, if we're springing off a purely materialist universe with nothing but the forces of evolution at work in forming us, how do we derive any standards? And if those standards are admitted to be purely subjective, then we can't condemn the past for burning witches or owning slaves, because that was their understanding at the time, and their standards were just as valid for them then as our standards about gay rights are for us today.
Basing your morality on utility, where that function is 'happiness' or some other measure, is an attempt to arrive at an independent objective standard of what is good and what is not, just as much as the project of religion.
Some might say this has already happened.
I certainly manage it. There's no inherent contradiction between moral relativism and considering your own morality to be better. Anyone claiming otherwise is engaged in the same kind of delusion as free will.
It only seems like that's "not allowed" to someone who earnestly believes that there's even an objective source of morality to go off in the first place.
You can claim "By my own standards, my morality is better" but you can't impose your standards on the past, because you have no idea what future generations, with their standards, will say about things you think neutral or even innocuous. If there is no objective standard but "what we think best at the time" - yeah, maybe we know more about some things now. But if they didn't know that back then, then they can't be blamed for not holding the same standards. You wouldn't burn a witch because you don't believe in witches. What would you do if you did believe in them? What do you do now, when you do believe some thing or person or cause is not just wrong, but actively evil and harming humanity?
I don't dispute that at all, I simply don't think anyone can do better, or if they claim to do so, they're grossly deluded or lying.
Maybe one day we invent or discover a hyper-compelling form of morality such that almost all people adopt it. Or we become better at memetic engineering and find some that sticks. They still won't be objective, but that's an impossible objective in the first place.
Burn them. If it was today, you'd bet I would do quite a bit of research to make sure I wasn't killing innocent people, which would hopefully dissuade me, but if I was evidently convinced.
I think I have better epistemics than average, but I'm not so full of myself that I think that if I were a medieval peasant, I'd immediately form the Enlightenment.
Like so many people around today, that I can see with my own eyes and interact with online? Live and let live, evidently. The only people I've ever burned are pregnant women, which sounds really bad until you realize it was in the context of cauterizing surgical bleeds.
In the limit:
[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]
-Charles James Napier
So you agree to let widows be burned, so long as it's online and you don't have to do anything about it?
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