The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith

[jstrodel]

I don't see what theists could have against arbitrary morality. That is after all what all morality is, especially religious morality. The only difference is that secular morality is based on man's experiences and reason, and religious morality is supposedly based on what god says.

Secular morality: Murder is wrong because it deprives the victim of their right to live, and has demonstrable negative effects on the people the victim is close to.

Religious morality: God tells us that murder is wrong, and so therefore it is.

Nothing that you said even remotely addresses the very serious questions raised by the post. Where does the victims "right to live" come from? To be an honest atheist means to reflect on the nature of these concepts. Is your knowledge that there is right to live stronger than your belief in absolute, unguided atheistic evolution as the means by which life was created? I do not think you can have both.

Why do people have a right to live more than ameobas? You may say "because people feel pain". But there are a million other considerations. What it is about people that makes them special?

Religious morality and secular morality are totally different. Religious morality says that people are created with a certain nature, and to disagree with that nature is to rebel against God. Things are not only prohibited because God forbids them, they are prohibited because that prohibition is part of the divine order of the universe that is established.

Secular morality simply invents categories, although usually those categories are related to Judeo-Christian values and past precedent, and are worth taking seriously, even if you are nihilist. But practically, there is no reason to accept those categories and believe they have more authority than some other category that you invent.

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Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.

The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist....

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The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.

The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.

What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.

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Why are you so closed minded?

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If there are no moral imperatives, the only ground for actions is pure cynicism.

It is even more egregious cynicism to suggest there is some sort of paradox there, as you are doing.

If you are a nihilist, you cannot be a moral person. You would argue, as someone that is incapable of being a moral person, I have no duty to be a moral person.

No, as a person who is amoral, what you are free to do is to live in complete cynicism. If you participate in the political processes and speak as if there are moral absolutes, you are a liar, plain and simple. Of course you do not have duties to avoid lying, but the linguistic categories of cynicism and deceit still apply to you.

But this gets back to my original point: there is really no duty attached to any of this, for the nihilist. But the nihilist will separate himself from the rest of the world, which does not function according to this pattern, and will be hated, as is appropriate.

I do not need moral absolutes to be a participant in the political process. I can use the politic process to follow my own arbitrary preferences.

That is exactly what I was talking about in the previous post, and that would make you cynical and a bad person.

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You are repeating the main point of the post. Exactly, what makes people more important than dolphins? Or ants, for that matter? Why should human civilization exist at all, why not be a primitivist? Why not believe that one race is superior to another, or create a nationalistic morality?

Nothing makes us better. Seriously. We're all just collections of atoms facing a completely indifferent universe.e

Labeling your position existentialism instead of nihilism does nothing to counter the nihilistic tendencies it would create in people that hear what you believe. How do you educate children? How do you teach them the difference from right and wrong when there is no reason to obey it?

The most important question in the world is how to be a good person. You are not really getting to the bottom of the issue. Nothing that you have written scratches the surface of the debates surrounding moral skepticism. Because you have a nicer sounding name for moral skepticism, called existentialism, does not answer the question. What makes people more important than dolphins. Or in another way: How do you know that Jewish people aren't inferior to whites? Why shouldn't one group enslave another group?

What is a 'good person'?

A good person is a person that lives in a way that is consistent with how people are created to live.

You get your morals from the culture you're raised in. The morals in the US are going to be very different than the morals in China (for instance, individualism vs "for the greater good").

That is true that you get your morals from the culture you are from, but that does nothing to deal with the problem of cultural relativism. What if you have a choice to either fight in the Chinese military or the American military. How do you know which country to serve? Should you follow Hitler because you were born in Germany.

Nothing that you have written comes close to dealing with the problem of moral skepticism.