To me the thought of heaven or even hell after death would be better then nothing at all, looseing all your thoughts your feelings everything, I would rather burn eternally.

But with religion came a new political concept trying to subjicate laws that perhaps people would be more scared to commit since it has eternal reprocussions versus just mortal ones. If you knew that stealing something would get you a slap on the wrist, and nothing, just imagine you have no moral's, would you do it? Now assumeing you still have no morale's but the consiquences of you stealing whether caught or not is burning in a fiery pit for all of time, wouldn't you be alot more hesitant?

there is no meaning to life we live we have all the fun we can and then we just die and become nonexistent in a void of darkness...the same darkness we were in before we were born....all religion is is a security blanket for those that fear death...i myself fear becoming nonexistent but there is nothing i can do about it and i am not going to fool myself into thinking there is an afterlife just to feel better about my life....no knowing there is no existence after death makes me want to live my life to the fullest

Actually humans would have no morals if atheism was correct. Let's say you have morals and feel the need to pull a kid out from a fire. In evolution this would go against all odds to my survival, it would be one less person for me to beat in life and thus a waste of my time. The only time an animal might do that is if it's one of their own and will help their certain group grow stronger.

Though this thread is hanging, it's never a dying subject, nor do I think does it lead nowhere...

First, forgive me for the length, I began typing and realized I went on for a while. I think this is a discussion that tends to overlook some things, so I tried to fill in some gaps or give new form to previous points.


So my question to the question originally posed about meaning, why exactly is it the case that life is "worthless" if say the endurance of an essential self (soul) is mortal?

I do not think we should accept this either/or, that either you are a Platonist (and Christianity is certainly doctrinally influenced by aspects of Platonism, especially concerning the immortality of the soul) or a nihilist. The thing is, nihilism (as Nietzsche characterizes it, that "uncanniest of guests") appears as a problem only in certain historical situations, namely when a coherent shared form of ethical life, call it traditional morality, breaks down and further there is a way of articulating the experience of that breakdown. I bring up Nietzsche as a quick example because the madman's infamous declaration in The Gay Science, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." is not a statement about history (or being). It is not that there was a God but subsequently left the universe or is unusually silent. Further, "we have killed him"? It is a provocation to be sure, but what he is trying to get at is that in his present, we might even just call it "modernity", morality as given in a tradition cannot be taken for granted (this is what the enlightenment of the previous 2 centuries was all about, thus morality needed to be grounded in reason, or conscience, or whatever). Further that need to see morality cohere with reason comes from a religious impulse that became more prominent after the Reformation: the notion that acting morally, even if all moral principles are in the Bible, requires knowledge. Nietzsche's real critique of Christianity (which I am not pretending to do justice to here) hinges on his seeing the practice of Christianity, as a religion, which is not just a set of theological doctrines, led from its moral universalism to a "will to truth". Christianity provided the necessary conditions in Europe for advances in science into modernity not just culturally but ideologically. By the 19th century, Nietzsche cannot ignore the clear tensions between philosophy, science, and religion, and that with each new generation the form of "ethical life" is not simply given as traditionally self-evident. Thus, "God is dead" (representation of given moral totality) and "we have killed him." (will to truth leading to ratification of lack of moral totality)

This semi-digression through Nietzsche then sets up the point I think is crucial. Religion is not just a set of illusory ideas (contra the Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins crowd), it isn't a "competitor" with science, because while there are overlaps due to the history of, say, Christianity as an institution, they address different aspects of human life. Religion coordinates a community's life together, as each individual is reflected in the whole and the whole reflected in the individual. It has served as a source of explanation for events, but that is a product of it being what it is. Christianity is interesting as a religion because it is the first, so far as I know, that preaches an emphatically universal message, one that is not tied to a specific political structure or ethnicity (see of course Galatians 3:28) and further it seeks to convert without conquest. "Pagan" religions had no concept of this, when Rome conquered a people it conquered that peoples gods with its gods, no other way for them to extend their reach. Indeed, on all appearances, it not only proclaims a truth, it is itself a bearer of truth (the truth of religion itself).

So this gets me back to nihilism. Is life meaningless without an ultimate purpose or promise of endurance (afterlife, etc)? Well hopefully I have made a little case for the historicity of such ideas, and that if modernity means the loss of a given shared morality (and the evidence is all around you, look at how many subjective relativists there are, "I have my morality, you have your morality, and hey that's fine as long as we get along") and a loss of a shared experience of who we are as a community either lived through religion, art practices, whatever, it does not mean that the only alternative is "life is worthless". It does raise the question of how we do understand ourselves and articulate that understanding to ourselves. Presently of course we get a drastically fractured response. My suspicion though is that most of us, and yes many that aren't religious, do not at all feel the threat of nihilism or see it as a problem. Because if it is, it is a problem of alienation (what I mean is that I cannot recognize myself for what or who I am, which usually means I cannot recognize myself in my community and cannot recognize my community in myself). Having that experience of connection, of identity with myself, is already "meaning in life." Meaning is bound to that communal self-grounding, so in the case of my death, my death will also have meaning as it has meaning for that coordinated community. Even so, it isn't troubling that in 4 billion years the sun is going to expand into a red giant and vaporize the Earth, when of course all remains of any of us will definitely be gone. Life still won't have been meaningless, as meaning has always been tied to that infinite separateness and infinite connectedness that make us who we are. (It's something that Paul teaches as well...I do even recommend atheists read Paul's letters, although it takes a little effort to think past 1900 years of orthodoxy to get a rich appreciation of his thought. Some good Biblical radical politics even...)

So yeah, meaning isn't a matter of a opinion, nor eternal. Morality as well, not a matter of opinion, but neither is it eternal. Think the Declaration of Independence, what it means to found a people on "We hold these truths to be self-evident". Rational self-evidence, coupled with a working out its relation to religious doxa ("all men are created.."). But importantly this new community is founded on something "we hold" and nothing else is actually necessary (even if truths aren't exactly "self-evident").


Thanks for reading to anyone that has...

atheists are not "nothing" for not having a soul( which doesn't exist anyways.) I have very upstanding morals. I work at a job where I handle money on a constant basis. I have had over $150 dollars handed to me be a person not paying attention AND I HANDED IT BACK TO HIM. I just don't believe in any sort of sky-fairy. I live day-to-day trying to make the world better and improving myself so i can provide a good life for myself and hopefully my parents, who have given much to me. Even though they look down on me and tell me I'm going to hell for not believing in the huckster, jesus, I still want to be able to buy them a house. I think it is disgusting the way x-tians blow off someone's death by saying they are "going some place better." just remember all the good times you had with that person in life and remember them always.