Moral Nihilism

[LukeMC]

Logic is meaningless.

Morality is meaningless.

Happiness is meaningless.

Killing is meaningless.

This forum is meaningless.

Detect the trend?

That too, is meaningless.

Value is meaningless.

Life is meaningless.

Valuing your life is meaningless.

Empathy is meaningless.

Sounding like a broken record is meaningless.

Emoticons are meaningless.

You state your position well LukeMC, but if you agree that atheism entails nihilism, you are living your life inconsistently with your own beliefs; which in turn entails that either you don’t take your atheism seriously or you don’t really believe it entails nihilism. A consistent nihilist wouldn’t bother trying to convince anyone that his view is correct, because that would be meaningless.

It is a necessary inconsistency. To draw an analogy to your position, you seem to be stating the following:

Shit smells bad in your opinion
Your opinion is meaningless and the shit really doesn't smell "good" or "bad"
To live consistently with your beliefs, you must smell neither good nor bad in the shit, regardless of your brain and sensory organs.

It's out of my control Charles. Whether or not the things have meaning, I cannot possibly abandon them on the grounds of my disbelief in their meaning. You propose that I could just choose to switch off my brain and nervous system and all of my emotions at a whim. I can't. Thanks to my hotwiring, it wouldn't be possible for me to see things as they are; I can only perceive of things in whatever way my body is wired to allow (enter subjectivity and Adrian's points).

Imagine this rather extreme scenario. I decide my life is worthless and want to end it because "it doesn't matter anyway". I put my hands around my own throat and try to strangle myself. No matter how little I value my life, my body will always take control and force me to let go. This example is just to show how logical conclusions cannot override the basic functions of the body. "Digestion is meaningless. Stomach, shut down please... please? Oh come on "

So in the same way I cannot shut down my systems by choice, I cannot switch off my empathy, my love for happiness or my concept of "meaning". It may indeed be an inconsistency, but it isn't one which we can help. This may indeed have been your original point

One thing is for certain though, us atheists aren't making a hypocritical incosistency, as it is beyond our control. If we could live life without being tied to our ingrained perceptions of meaning I think we'd choose nonexistance, as this life would truly be meaningless and not worth living. Consistency 101 (Y). So while I agree objective moral nihilism is the logical following of a-supernaturalism, and it does follow that we might aswell kill people, I disagree that we as humans should start introducing a bunch of new genocidal blueprints for the future. In the real meaningless universe we might aswell, but under or delusionary (subjective) view of things we wouldn't be able to do such things anymore. Living a fairy tale is the only life we can know, and for all it's worth, we like feeling happy.


Haha, I'd hate to see a fundementalist get hold of this post and start spouting it to the masses. "Look! The atheists admit they are inconsistent! Their belief contains a hole which we can exploit! God wins!". Although, I don't think God would solve this problem by any stretch of the imagination. It's just one of those funky things in the universe. Living a fairy tale being the price for happiness sounds so ridiculously like a criticism of religion that I hesitated to use it. But at the end of the day, religion isn't a necessary delusion for happiness, it's a delusion built upon a delusion (In my worthless opinion of course).

As a final note, the discussion of morality, meaning, etc, may be intrinsically worthless, but under our bubble of delusion I don't believe we should/could abandon this given only the conclusion we've drawn about nihilism. We will continue to operate under a system of value, meaning and whatnot for as long as our brains force us to see things in this way. We are not omnipotent, we must bow to our limited capacity.