Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Esquilax]

All the arguments based on "it is not really in our best interest to be selfish" only provides subjective morality and not any objective framework that goes beyond a certain sets of conditions.

And you think christianity is any better? God's subjective opinions are still subjective, dude. You don't get to call them objective just because you think they're really, really authoritative.

Depending on the society we live in, you can get wide variations of opinion between the "morality" of a host of actions.

Which is why I make recourse to objective reality, and not society. It's really funny that you'll say reality isn't objective, but you'll say god's opinions are objective; it just tells me that you don't really know what either of those words mean.

How do you define "good" as in someone as a "good person"? In other contexts, we define something is "good" by how well it achieves its purpose. With naturalism, people have no intrinsic purpose--they are an assembly of atoms that experienced an unlikely chain of events. Morality becomes a matter of opinion and is relative and/or subjective. You can't leap from the "is" to the "ought".

And what is the intrinsic purpose of a person under christianity? How much they worship and obey god, right? So totally by coincidence, the "objective" morals that god gives you center solely around pleasing god. Gee, it's almost like the entire system is a self serving set of opinions, and has nothing to do with objectivity!

In our evolution, was it always wrong to murder, rape or steal? Animals do these acts every single day without being "evil". Did the unlikely leap to self-awareness suddenly endow us with a moral framework when a moment before it had not (or not to the same extent)? Would this not be proof of the subjective nature of morality.

Self awareness and cognition are what imbue us with the ability to consider morality at all. Like I said, morality requires a sufficient threshold of consciousness to even exist.

Some of you have mentioned societal goals (or any goals) that can help get from the is to the ought. What if someone does not want those goals--has no desire to do what others consider "good"?

Okay, look: if you won't take someone being unwilling to obey the morality of christianity as evidence against the efficacy of the christian moral system, do not think you can take people being unwilling to follow secular morality as evidence against that. I am so tired of hearing this same old crap, these problems that theistic morality also has in abundance and doesn't solve, as if your unwillingness to answer the questions you ask of us somehow means the problem is only with us.

However, we all ACT like there is objective morality. Baby studies indicate that we are born with a rudimentary moral sense. Why do people engage in self-sacrifice for others (even to the point of death)--sometimes for people he/she has not met? This is certainly not biological evolution speaking.

Because self sacrifice provides a net advantage to us as a species. You could at least try understanding what biological evolution is before you tell us what it is and isn't.

Do we all act like there is objective morality because it is convenient or expedient or is there really objective morality? If there really is objective morality, it did not come by naturalistic means.

How does it come from a god? How are god's subjective opinions somehow objective? You need to stop thinking that you can just poke holes in whatever anyone else believes without justifying your own beliefs, as though what you agree with is the default state that everyone else is departing from. It's simply not.