Lost my faith

[mepalmer3]

You're talking about two different things here. Individual values are not the same as society's moral standards. A lot of people seem to be confusing the two. Individual values are completely relative-- I can't tell you that my values are any better than yours.

If I value being honest and you value being dishonest, then I have no problem saying that my value is better than yours with respect to this.

The only way to measure which is 'good' and which is 'bad' is to compare them to our society's moral standard. If we all are supposed to have some kind of externally-given morals, wouldn't everyone's standards be the same? Wouldn't everybody in the world think it's wrong to kill cows or eat pork or have two wives?

I don't think there's any reason to suspect that we all perfectly get the moral code. Overall civilizations have had a real similar basic morality. See CSLewis's Abolition of Man.

Also -- what people believe and what is true are 2 different things often. It's like saying if evolution were true then why doesn't everyone believe in it?

The reason that Hitler was able to do so much damage was not because of his personal values. In a heathy society he would have been locked up [again.] It was because his society was so twisted to see violence and racism as perfectly normal that he could do the things he did. In Nazi Germany, showing compassion and mercy could be considered deviant behavior. Personal values only have meaning in the context of your own society.

But you just said a healthy society. What does that mean? Granted, i full well know what it means, it means a society that overall is doing right or better by a real moral code. So this subjective cultural morality isn't itself relative, it gets judged against other moralities. And we make statements like germany had an immoral or twisted society. How would we know it was twisted unless we knew what straight meant? And we simply don't unless there is something to real judge between the 2.