Reconciling morality with atheism

[kahljorn]

ya somebody brought up cultural/moral relativism and the entire search for morality ends. The entire problem with cultural relativism in any type of argument is that, just because cultures have differing meanings of good, doesn't mean that the good doesn't exist in some constant form which just hasn't been discovered yet (or has been and just isn't recognized as such).

Don't social philosophers usually ignore the concept of cultural relativism in any setting, except as a standard of objectivity for research purposes, because it's meaningless and pompous? You just end up whitewashing the world in something like nihilism, and not really discovering anything. WELL ITS ONLY GOOD BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE AT THESE TIMES DECLARED IT GOOD AND IT WORKED FOR THEM SO THE GOOD ISNT REALLY GOOD AT ALL SO WE CANT EVEN TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL.
"I WANT TO MAKE THIS LAW BUT I KNOW THAT IN 100 YEARS SOMEBODY WILL PROBABLY DISAGREE WITH IT." stuff like that happens or should happen logically (if you're consistent)! Eventually in order to make any sort of law you have to go out on a limb AND BE AFRAID THAT YOURE WRONG, completely ignoring cultural relativism. If you didn't, then things would be exactly the same in 1000 years.
Cultural relativism is a good argument ender but it's not really a good argument it's kind of like an appeal to ignorance or something like that, it's completely meaningless, but it sure sounds meaningful. Pointing out that there are different moralities and we don't know which one is REALLY right or maybe all of them are right! is pretty weightless. It doesn't mean that there isn't a "Right" morality just because we don't know it.

I don't think that noting cultural and moral relativism exist, and throwing in sociological utilitarian calculations of this relativism, really reconciles atheists with morality. All it really does is reinforce the problems with atheists and morality ;/ I mean maybe you could extend it as a critique of religious thought but that would be gay and pointless anyway.

the reason people say that atheists and cultural relativistic type people can't really be "Moral" is because they have no objective standard to look to, outside of law which isn't a good standard of morality AS ACHIMP BROUGHT UP because it reflects the standards of the time, so what is good is only temporally good because people believe it's good. With God giving us certain morals we have an objective moral standard to look to which supposedly persists throughout time; however, atheists and relativist type people can't or don't see this objective morality (unless they see what I was talking about).

Obviously there's millions of better ways to argue against this than bringing up relativism.

oh ya and finally the utilitarian benefit of an action is only one way to calculate if something is moral or immoral, and it's not like such calculations aren't without critique.