Wow, that's right up there with attempts to define God that end up defining God to be "the universe", "the laws of physics", or "mathematics".

Yes, technically you can define God to be any of these things and any of the above definitions would make me a theist. However, I don't think any of the above definitions are particularly helpful.

It is surprising to find someone on a site dedicated to the Art of Rationality who cannot imagine impersonal norms, since rationality is a set of impersonal norms. You are not compelled to be rational, to be moral, or to play chess. But if you are being rational, you should avoid contradictions--that is a norm. If you are being moral, you should avoid doing unto others what you would not wish done unto you. If you are playing chess, you should avoid placing the bishop on a square that cannot be reached diagonally from the current one. No-one makes you follow those rules, but there is a logical relationship between following the rules and playing the game: you cannot break the rules and still play the game. In that sense, you must follow the rules to stay in the game. But that is not an edict coming from a person or Person.

ETA: You may well need agents to have values. I don't require morality to be free of values.

Try this:

There exists a set of maxims which all intelligent and social agents find it in their long-term interest to adhere to, even if adherence is not always in the agent's short-term interest. These maxims are called a "moral code", particularly when the long-term incentive to adhere to the code arises by way of the approval or disapproval of other agents who themselves adhere to the code.

This view of morality is a 'moral realist' rather than 'moral conventionalist' position when it is claimed that there is a theoretically best moral code, and that it may be morally permissible to flout the locally conventional moral code if that code is different from the best code.

I think this provides a variant of moral realism without invoking a Supreme Lawgiver. Kant's categorical imperative was another (seriously flawed, IMO) attempt to derive some moral rules using no other assumptions beyond human rationality and social lifestyle. The moral realist position may well be incorrect, but it is not a nonsensical position for an atheist to take.

The moral realist position is nonsensical without an intelligence against whose preferences you can check.

This seems as well-motivated as the position that nothing can exist without someone to create it. That is, it seems intuitively true to a human since we privilege agency, but I don't see any contradiction, logical or otherwise, in having moral facts be real.

This question might reduce to the question of whether mathematical facts are "real", which might not make any more sense. Is there a sense in which there are "two" rocks here, even if there were no agent to count the rocks? Is there a sense in which murder is wrong, even if there was never anyone to murder or observe murder?

I think the only difficulties here are definitional (suggested by the word "sense" above) and the proper thing to do with a definitional dispute is to dissolve it. Most moral realists hereabouts are some sort of relativists (that is, we take it to be a "miracle" that we care about what's right rather than something else, and otherwise would have taken it to be a "miracle" that we care about something else instead of what's right, but that doesn't change what's right).

Wedrifid never said dashing babies against rocks was "wrong in the cosmic eyes of the universe". I suspect s/he values a culture that doesn't do that. That would be his or her personal value / preference.

That seems like a likely assumption. For a start it is terribly unhygenic. All brains, blood and gore left around the place. Lots of crows picking at little bits of baby. Flies and maggots. Ants. A recipe for spreading plague.

Our culture certainly does like to slap around those whose arguments are inconsistent... to the point that I suspect more consistent moral codes are consistent because the arguer is striving for consistency over truth than because they've discovered moral truths that happen to be consistent. We may have reached the point where consistent moral codes deserve more skepticism than inconsistent ones.

I am LDS, is there a problem with that?

Are you playing devil's advocate

Well, in this case it is God's advocate. Apparently I'm advocating for Lucifer.

Let me clarify that, shooting 7 year olds (or forcing puberty on five year olds so as to create babies before the parents are 8 and killing the parents before they turn eight so that it is a systematic sustained process (asking your sunday school teachers about such questions (or others like what happens if you pushed an angel into a black hole) can get strange reactions out of them, by the way, and make everyone else think you are crazy, but you already do so there isn't much to lose in sharing this)) only makes sense from an LDS perspective, unless you are already a psychopath. If you already were a psychopath then me sharing this won't change much. If you are not LDS or a psychopath then killing seven year olds should already be morally objectionable enough without further explanation

. If you are LDS killing seven year olds counts as shedding innocent blood which is an unpardonable sin. Further, not allowing agency was the plan of Lucifer and the reason he fell from heaven. Therefore, one would be implementing the devils plan by killing seven year olds as well as committing an unpardonable sin. Assuming that besides gaining a body the other part of the purpose of life is to be tested in all things then attempting to prevent testing is contrary to the will of God. Further, assuming that God knows what He is doing better then you do, being omniscience and all, then implement such a strategy would result in no net change to which persons will be saved in the end and which ones will not be saved and can only result in your own damnation.

You can fit, like, a gazillion of them on the head of a pin so they shouldn't even feel much in the way of tidal forces. Don't Angels have teleportation powers anyway?

Not in the LDS perspective. For us there are three (sort of five) types of angels. There are the spirits of people that haven't been born, the spirits of people that are dead but not resurrected, and the people that have been resurrected. The other are people sent from God that are not dead, being both those that are mortal and those that have been translated. The mortal one is uninteresting, one could probably find a grad student willing to do the experiment with the promise of a PHD. The others are the more interesting ones, being what effects does gravity have on spirit matter (being that for the LDS spirit is a type of matter) and what effects would it have on a resurrected body or a translated body. Destruction of the spirit is not a possible outcome. I have determined that, unfortunately, God is not likely to allow test subjects to volunteer themselves for the experiment and/or provide a convenient black hole for said experiment. Presumably once one is resurrected one will gain that knowledge.

Something like Teleportation, I am unclear on the details.