What's the source? I'm especially interested in the Mackie quote and where it's from.

Okay, then your main point is just obviously false, so why are you saying it? Atheists aren't pretending, they really do believe that some things are beautiful, good, true, valuable, joyful and wonderful. Your own belief that these attributes are dependent on God existing is rejected by virtually all of the atheists that I am familiar with. It is certainly rejected by the atheists you listed (Nietzsche and Russell).

There is no dishonesty here--there is only your own inability to come to terms with the fact that some people really do believe what they say they believe, that there is no God and that their life still has meaning.

Forget the ants. I'll go with:

I think that's equivalent but make the substitution if you prefer.

You're not special, deal with it.

I'm just saying they're inconsistent. Because they're smart it's fair to think they understand what they're saying. If they do understand it it's hard to see how they're honest. If they're honest it's hard to see how they understand it.

Sartre said near the end of his life that he was considering Catholicism, or maybe it was deism. Because he couldn't believe his life was really meaningless. The High Priest of meaningless, the Grand Poobah of carve your own meaningless meaning.

first explain to me your first conclusion, don't change the subject. So, again.. HOW DO YOU ARRIVE with a conclusion from those two quotes that according to ATHEISM we are no better then ANTS. Please explain what do you mean by better.

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, ... no purpose ... nothing but pitiless indifference.

A. Ants have no purpose.
B. We have no purpose.

A=B.

Fine. So why blow the humanistic trumpet? Why cry over the holocaust?

Purpose in what sense?

btw. A=B is terrible..

It's as if we say dogs have ears and humans have ears , dogs are humans.

No I haven't. You're welcome to try to prove otherwise. I am comfortable that the majority of people here including any mods will know exactly what I'm referring to. If a mod asks I will look up multiple quotes to support what I'm saying.

This has nothing to do with what we're discussing.

no one misunderstands you.

This has nothing to do with this thread or the accuracy of my posts above. I don't really care what you make of this post, my entire purpose of quoting it was to show that Christians believe in subjective morality too as you've argued repeatedly.

Because it's wrong to kill people just b/c they're Jewish. Even if your religion tells you that they killed Jesus, it's still wrong.

It must feel kind of pointless for you to read the writings of atheists if you are think the best explanation for their disagreeing with you is that they're being dishonest. Do you make that assumption about me as well?

As for your cute little story about Sartre, Christians tell the same story about all famous atheists. Of course, since atheists don't have High Priests or Grand Poobahs, it doesn't much matter if he did consider believing in God. After all, I've considered it, why shouldn't he? And anyway, Sartre believed a bunch of other stupid things during his lifetime.

Yeah well. We're done. I was just giving NR and the theists the name of a book related to the subject in case they wanted to check it out.

We're theists and we like to cross post. I've heard all the atheists views and I don't intend to cross post with atheists in the future. Their views don't interest me because I don't have anything in common with them.

I'm purely interested in spiritual development these days and so are the other theists imo. So it's a cross post between theists so you can butt out now.

What would that imply?

rly?

Nihilist: The Intellectually Honest Atheist

its a 10min video on youtube, please just watch it.

Whether or not the universe has a purpose has no bearing on whether or not our lives do.

Ask Dawkins.

Whatever purpose means it has more gravitas than ears of any kind.

NR-

Let's suppose you're entirely right.

Why should we care?

This doesn't really have anything to do with what I said. The phrase "Noble Lie" comes from an atheist. The point is inconsistency. Did you read my last McCarthy quote? Do you think he meant those thousands of authors were knowlingly lying?

The story about Sartre is well-documented from what I've seen. I've never used the stories about Darwin, Lincoln, Voltaire, etc., because I find them dubious - but Sartre's final conversations were taken down by an admirer and caused his girlfriend de Beauvoir to react. And the point I'm making wasn't really whether he recanted, but whether he had previously believed life is meaningless - and that isn't just some minor article of a passing belief, it was his entire raison d'etre, the very foundation of his life's work.

Right about what, care about what? Seriously, not being facetious.

About atheism implying moral nihilism.

This is an old dodge which I will address briefly, one time. What Russell, Dawkins, and all the others who have stated something similar mean, isn't that you can't find a temporal, relative purpose. Maybe animals do as well. What they mean is there is no purpose beyond yourself, nothing of any significance past your own lifetime.

My quote of Russell said:

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

What despair? If the purpose you create for yourself, your finite, temporal, transitory and eternally meaningless purpose is enough, what is "unyielding despair"? Maybe you don't see that or feel it. Atheists from Nietzsche to Dawkins feel it deeply and comment on it endlessly. Many of them seem to have the sole object of erasing or at least ignoring that despair.

My OP was meant to be broader than that. The real issue is why should you care about anything on atheism? So on atheism, you shouldn't care about moral nihilism - or religion, science, murder, charity or this forum.

That's the inconsistency. The thousands of books McCarthy says are lies - why care about them, or his book for that matter? But then Sartre found he did care. And of course he showed it by his life long before then, in his social activity and his attack on falsehood. But on atheism, why should I care about Viet Nam? In 1000 years or 100 who will know the difference? Atheism destroys any real basis for caring.

I might point out that Voltaire, often quoted approvingly by atheists, was no atheist. His famous quote "If God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent Him" was actually a satirical attack on atheists. An early version of the Noble Lie.

But then, equally, you shouldn't care about the fact that you shouldn't care. Meaning that you shouldn't care if you happen to care. Why should you?

It's a vacuous point.