Christians take on the more nihilistic atheists

[henryp]

(First off, I'm saying nihilistic, but I don't know what it's really called.  Whatever it is I am.  Materialism is another one that seems to hit a lot of the notes)


I know the moral argument is a big one for Theists in attempting to expose inconsistencies in many Atheist belief systems.

But what do you have for the the Atheists who don't believe in meaning, or morals, or even free will.  I know during my time as a Catholic, I always tried to present the alternative to an existence of God as, rationally, a very undesirable reality.  The obvious flaw, which surprisingly went unchallenged (although Atheism hadn't caught on yet), was that being undesirable has no bearing on something being true or not.  So while I dumped God due to my perceiving it as goofy, I stuck by my guns so to speak, and more or less ended up where I said I should rationally end up.

So for those of us who skipped over humanism and went straight to believing it's all just a big evolutionary hoax, do you have arguments for those people that poke holes in their rationality?

(I'd be interested in non-theists take on poor reasoning as well)

The desirability being irrelevant is one thing, but I think that the even better argument is that Atheist actually make more moral individuals on the average. They have a lower divorce rates, lower crime rates, secular societies have far less war, etc. So whatever hypotheticals Christians and Muslims want to throw out as to Atheism meaning people have less morals, reality says it isn't true.

I'm not looking to make an argument against theism or the moral argument.  Theism is dumb.  I've moved on.  I'm looking to attack myself. 

My poorly stated goal was to ask theists how they argued against atheists who embodied the alternative in the moral argument.  The one's who say "I agree, no God = no morals/meaning/purpose, and since there is no God, I have no morals/meaning/purpose."  
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I agree we should expect atheists to better people than theists in the circles we'd run in anyways. In advanced societies, the brainwashing is done.  We're all hammered with the golden rule our entire childhood, and see nothing but positive reinforcement of that idea from almost every source of influence during our developmental years.  Just unending positive feedback being associated with 'being good.'  And we'll now brainwash our own children in the same way. It's really quite similar to religion.  The difference being that societal pressure is more flexible, so as what is 'good' evolves, so does the behavior of people trying to be 'good.'  That's really the shortcoming of religion, I imagine.  It's too inflexible.  You can't just say "God was just kidding, gays are cool now."  Religion slowly disqualifies itself from individuals lives, until the majority of society disagrees with religion on what is 'good,' and eventually religion becomes what is 'bad', and then poof.  I think that's what we're seeing now in the US right now.

My question to the atheists would be:  If I recognize I've been conditioned all my life to believe I should be good, does it seem reasonable to toss out what I've been conditioned to believe, and start from scratch to form a more rational belief system? And could it be reasonable to conclude that 'good' as society dictates, and how I think I should reasonably behave are at odds? And maybe toss in a 'if so, why don't you? Or did you, and just happen to come to the same conclusion as society?"