Attn: Theists - What would it take to prove you wrong?

[Esquilax]

Interesting....in fact...you agree with Lewis then on your observation regarding the fact that there is large agreement of basic moral judgements across diverse cultures.

You then stop and say this is not cultural relativism.

But common consensus morality is simply might makes right, then you are left with cultural relativism. There is no escape.

Actually, yes there is, and it's this: we live in a physical universe that has consistent physical laws, and can thus state a certain set of objective truths about our experiences within it as living beings. Life is preferable to death, pleasure is preferable to pain, health to sickness, and so on and so forth. We are alive, and thus we know the positive things that are conducive to a better life, and the negative things that aren't. Combined with this is an evolved sense of moral judgment sculpted by our need to survive by banding into groups. Our current moral systems are really just advanced versions of the things that hunter gatherer tribes would have liked.

So, while some of the finer details of morality are subjective, there are a number of central tenets that must be obeyed for a society to function; murder must be illegal, because death is bad and life is good. Ditto for theft and rape and all the other higher order crimes, because those are objectively bad, in that allowing them to run rampant would cause the group to destabilize into adversarial feudal tribes. And so we band together, under mutual agreement that we wouldn't like to be murdered or robbed or what have you, and ensure that our laws are enforced.

For you must indeed be aware...that societies are simply collections of individuals at base. Many societies may agree as a whole that it is better to outlaw abortion and homosexuality.

Right, and these things are objective too, in that we can foresee the consequences of consistently applying those general principles: while abortion and homosexuality are "soft" issues because the incorrect method of dealing with them won't outright fracture society, we can still think of them in objective terms, and come to the conclusion that outlawing them is wrong. For example, outlawing abortion, if taken to its logical conclusion, violates bodily autonomy in a way we would never allow in other cases where life and death is not in the balance. The same is true for the outlawing of homosexuality, though there are additional rights and privacy violations involved there too.

The only way we as a group can outlaw those things without inviting broad consequences is to selectively, that is to say hypocritically enforce them on minority groups, which is itself a violation of our highly held principle of equality.

You may have other societies that disagree, but if the former societies are strong enough to exert their influence over others and render any opposition to their legislation void, then the former societies are in the majority. They can even invade those societies they believe to be acting bad and evil and chastise them and try to persuade them to adopt their morality.

The Allies did this to the Axis powers in WW2.

Of course, one might argue that the Allies were correcting an objective moral evil, like imprisoning a murderer to dissuade other murderers, just on a larger scale...