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Ultimately, it comes back to religion.
Atheists are almost always moral relativists.
Whereas there probably are some atheistic moral absolutists, I don't think that their beliefs would stand up to much scrutiny. Absolutism simply cannot be justified in a godless world.
Anyone with Christian beliefs holds absolutism to be true.
It is possible to be a theist and still hold onto moral relativism, but most religions that deal with morality in any kind of way tend to push absolutism.
"Non-personal" god based religions have no need for absolutism.
It may seem that I am sadly, forcing this thread down the dead end which is "religion v.s. atheism", but hopefully we can avoid all of that in this thread.
However, I do see that the relativism/absolutism argument is indeed inextricably linked to religion.
So perhaps while avoiding the issue of whether God exists or not, we can focus on how the two moral philiosophies are related to the concept of God (real or imaginary).
BTW: The quoted text rainheart posted is just blatant ignorance and misrepresentation.
It is essentially a reductio ad absurdum argument, but based entirely on fallacy.
Taking the tennants of relativism, she attempts to derive a "contradiction", proving that the original premise was flawed.
But this is entirely missing the point (more than likely on purpose).
that something is "right and wrong at the same time" is not a contradiction at all. Certainly stated as is, it may sound like one, but not only does it not do any dammage to relativism, in fact that is exactly what relativism is!
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