Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

I like this topic because I believe that moral standards can actually be fairly simple to apply.

"Treat others as you would want to be treated." If you can feel pain then you can understand why inflicting pain on someone else without a cause is bad. Because if you punch someone for a reason which doesn't make good sense then what is preventing someone else from punching you?

What about emotional pain? Should you feel comfortable bullying someone but then be upset when it happens to you?

Lying is another easy example to justify, if you lie too much then no one will trust you.

So if we don't want to watch our society descend into a chaos where people inflict pain on each other, steal from each other and lie one to another then we have every reason to live as though these virtues of fairness matter. 

It also gives us a good reason to establish a Justice system which punishes behavior that is far outside the accepted norm.

Thanks for the reply. 
I like this topic because it is appears simple and yet is actually quite complex. The question isn’t whether I think you have good standards there, the question is whether those standards are mind independently real. That they exist in some way and are authoritative regardless of what people think. That there is a real standard of good.
Do you think that your moral views there point to such a standard, and can you elaborate on how?

Another way to phrase this. You have given good normative ethics there, I am asking about the metaethics.