I used to be a Christian. My view of morality was that without a god, there can only be moral nihilism. It was only natural that I would move on to accept this once I lost my faith and become an atheist.

But.. I have had lapses where I occasionally accept moral realism from time to time. It is difficult to maintain moral nihilism as a human being as we are emotional and cannot help to make moral judgements. We simply have a strong need to project our own mental states onto the world as objectively true, something that is difficult to simply train away.

I have however accepted something that is called moral conservationism, a stance coined by the moral error theorist Jonas Olson. It says that it is not only alright to have lapses into moral belief, but that it is likely even practically efficient as human beings. One example is that it boosts our resolve where we otherwise might falter. Another is that we do not have to feel a psychological weight when we are emotionally moved to condemn something. ("When I saw the dead children on TV, I believed at that moment that it was morally wrong"). They key understanding here is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with holding false beliefs. There are more arguments, and probably better, but I do not recall them right now.

An important component of the above is that we can use moral language in a pragmatic sense, to denote our own emotions and attitudes in regard to different social phenomena. In this way, it might satisfy a seeming need to continue using moral discourse.