Absolutely!

Thou shall not kill unless your pregnancy is an inconvienence to your lifestyle.

Can you say that without making an absolute? If you cannot, then there are absolutes -- at least one.

I do find someone who is found of saying such, wants everything to be so gray as to make judgment impossible and moral value irrelevant. On the other hand, many who are fond of pointing out or defining absolutes are wanting things so black and white that they don't have to think hard, just memorize the absolutes.

So, in my book, are there absolutes? Absolutely, but applying any certain absolute to any certain situation might be relatively subjective or relative. Let's try an example: Gravity absolutely exists. How much it affects you just depends on how close you are to large massive object. The absolute of gravity applies differently at sea level on earth than it does on the moon than it does in orbit around the Earth at 1,500 miles altitude.

Nothing is absolute, If I really believe that the train approaching at high speed is a mashmellow and cannot hurt me, then I will be unharmed.

If you try it and fail, then the failure is in your faith, not my logic.

Or so the thinking goes, There are absolutes, the idea however is based in individual understanding of the complexities of human experience means that we may not arrive at the same conclusion at the same time, so in that respect, there are no absolutes to experience. Freud, made this into a leap into morals, and then all hell broke loose as the thinkers tried to base everything on experience rather than external views. .. IMHO anyway.

As one of my Philosophy professors once said ...

A Mans morality is dictated by his philosophy. and never was a truer word spoken.

Shhhh! If people ever found out that there ARE absolutes, we'd be in some serious shit, relatively speaking.

As you seem to point out, would be, in and of itself, a contradiction.

it simply means there are exceptions to every rule or axiom. If you were to say "Hitler was absolutely evil". This conveys the degree of depravity of Hitlers reign. However, to say Hitler himself, the man, the human being was the literal incarnation of evil is debatable - in other words the word "absolute" does not apply. Look at it another way. To kill human beings is absolutely wrong. Is it? Is this true in all cases? No. To steal is absolutely wrong. Is it? Not in all cases. Sometimes we kill others in defense of our own lives and our liberty and our beloved family. Sometimes people steal in as a matter of survival.