Why even bother "trying to live a good life" if "a good life" is just a human construct and there is no judgement on that in the afterlife?
By your assumptions, every atheist should just, like, die or at best, live a meaningless life.
By your assumptions, every atheist should just, like, die or at best, live a meaningless life.
I am Catholic, but the morality of an atheist is no surprise to me.
If your religious beliefs were somehow proven to be invalid, I guarantee you wouldn't just kill yourself, as you claim. You'd ascribe meaning however you can, and live your best life, as you always have.
If you are gay or otherwise something that was (previously) on the fringe of accepted culture, it becomes super obvious from a young age that people who try to tell you how to live your life are full of crap. I figured this out at the young age of 9. What shocked me then and continues to shock me now, though, is the cowardice and ignorance of people like you who, faced again with infinite moral and ontological agency, are afraid, and would rather die than have to come up with meaning and purpose themselves. What a boring, privileged, and childish take. People like this are either chronically unimaginative or have simply never experienced any adversity of any kind.
Still, some will press on and say, OK, well why is it that organized religions around the world tend to be somewhat similar despite tremendous geographic boundaries throughout history -- isn't it significant that all these different people and cultures came up with very roughly the same set of ideas and moral values? Of course it's significant! The power of the placebo effect is well documented and religion, if you think about it, is the ultimate placebo, and we've had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve the optimal set of religious values that produce the most dopamine while being the best at placating and controlling the general populace with promises of an afterlife and judgement for wrongdoing (where wrongdoing is anything that threatens the status quo). The best part is even if you agree with one particular religion, you have to acknowledge that yes, other religions seem to provide the same existential, spiritual, and psychological relief across the board (hence the millions of practitioners), and seem to organize society in a way that is pliable and easy to be led by a centralized authority (which historically is a good predictor for the success of things like empires, etc). So is it really surprising that after running hundreds of thousands of years of randomized trials to find the most effective religion with the best placebo effect, we've arrived at a select few that placate most people at least until they examine their convictions more closely and are properly educated? Knowing this, you could just as easily ascribe meaning yourself to get similar effects, so why go to the trouble of believing in something you know deep down to be false? You could get all these same effects, minus the cognitive dissonance of doubt, by simply taking charge of your existence and ascribing meaning to things you care about.
On the flip side, how are people so OK with the idea of an afterlife? When surveyed, most people say they would not be OK with living forever, yet we are all supposed to look forward to an afterlife where we do in fact live forever? What if heaven turns out to be not to your liking, and then you are stuck there forever? Wouldn't it then be a sort of hell? Even if you like it at first, eventually we get sick of everything anyway (without the urgency created by having limited time, meaning fades regardless of what you believe), so if heaven existed, it would eventually be hell no matter who you are. To eternal life, or any kind of an afterlife, I say no thank you unless I still have the option to off myself when I feel like being done. What right does some God have to imprison me in some eternal "ideal" afterlife and never allow me to just end, if I want to? What if the people he saves are actually super annoying sycophants and I'm stuck listening to them blather for all of eternity?
But, the religious person will say, "how can you believe things just end!! That's horrifying!!". Again this is such an infantile take. Maybe to an 8 year old this is horrifying, but if you think about it, it's not horrifying at all. Pain is scary, sure, and we don't like to imagine those we care about having to live on without us, but if you're simply afraid of the state of "not existing", full stop, you're being silly -- you wouldn't be there to experience whatever it is you're worried about anyway, because you wouldn't exist, you wouldn't be able to experience, so it couldn't be a negative or a positive experience! Sounds incredibly relaxing to me, knowing that eventually I don't have to exist anymore. If anything, it is much, much scarier to believe that perception or consciousness continues after death in some way, especially if they used ugly drapes and you're stuck with that for eternity.
I just always find it strange the way that "100% athiests" seem to ignore the logical conundrum of "I don't need a God or theology to live a good life" when our constructed definition of "good" comes from religion.
I am wondering what makes you think that?
On "good comes from religion"... you can start with the western classics (or eastern classics, but I do not know them) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/
Then maybe take a course or two on Ethics https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-23...
Then explore from there.
You can spend a few weekends or a lifetime on this if you'd like, and either way it will be worth the time.
“The people that came up with <useful idea> also believed <useless idea>” does not imply that “To benefit from or further refine <useful idea>, one must also accept <useless idea>”.
(I don’t see religion as useless, but there is no reason people who do would have any problem adapting and refining moral ideas first developed in a religious context, any more than religious people do for ideas developed in different religious contexts than their own.)
To elaborate,
> Most anthiests seem to be nihilists
Not true
> they're already (claiming to be) doing that
No, they're not
> the logical conundrum of "I don't need a God or theology to live a good life"
There's no conundrum or contradiction here, plenty of us live good lives
> our constructed definition of "good" comes from religion
Sounds like a made-up fact. I don't need an omnipotent third party to validate that taking another person's life, or stealing from them, etc. is not right. Empathy and the idea of "do unto others" are quite easily understandable and relatable outside of the context of religion.
I believe the main characteristic that takes apart atheist from other belief systems is that ultimately without a god that objectively defines what is good, one must define by himself what is good. This one one side is liberating because there is no more pressure between what one thinks is right and what the religion tell them, but at the same time extremely difficult because one exposes themself to all their psychological weaknesses (and to whom can manipulate them).