I will become Atheist if.....

[Aegon]

My point is that it's self-evident. We hold value because we exist, and are alive, and feel anger and happiness and pain and sorrow and displacement and family and love and hate, and we are born and we die and all there is is what's in the middle. Our lives are spent impacting other lives. We are complex beings who crave meaning and belonging. Our existence is justification of our value. That's it. I can't make it simpler than that. For some reason you think it must be further complicated. In your eyes you can't see why I would see value in things without God. And I think that is incredibly sad. I think you should drop your beliefs and learn to see and cherish the value in things without it. Learn to see deeper meaning in the material. Because if your belief in God is the only reason anything holds value or meaning... then that isn't real, and you cannot be truly happy. From my perspective, anyway. I think I recall telling you this a month or two ago, MK. You have to find meaning within yourself and the nature around you without God, or you will be stuck in this rut of yours forever, never feeling true bliss. I know you've had issues with this from your past posts. I'm not asking you to abandon your faith, but rather put it in the backseat for a while. Once you feel comfortable looking at things from this atheist's perspective, like I've been outlining to you, then return to it. I think you will be more at peace.

But I'm just some idiot on a forum. Who knows if what I'm saying holds any merit.

What you said to me just further emphasizes life and value are interlinked, that by viewing we have life, we have value.  But you are doing this from the framework that life has value.

I'm not asking you to justify belief in value, I am asking to show how it works in Atheistic framework, to justify it from this framework. Yes we obviously feel compelled to value our living essence.

What is important in what I stated in the OP is human value.  Animals are alive, but we don't value them to the degree of humans.

You can't just say well we feel value therefore it's real. Yes if we see value it's real. And we definitely do see it. The question is, what narrative does go with. The Atheistic framework or Theistic framework.

I don't see it working with Atheistic framework because it would be in many ways arbitrary and chaotic although given structure in some degree if it came to be as opposed to always existed.

To me I believe value is true, it's true to the extent it's accurately given to us.   But what accuracy can we have through blind forces of evolution?

"You can't just say well we feel value therefore it's real" Watch me!

Like I said, MK, life is in many ways arbitrary and, in some ways, a little chaotic. It's one of the many reasons people cling to religion, as is evident by your position. They need to make sense of all the nonsense, and they need some sort of structure and security. "We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos." But the world is not structured in the way you want it to be, and there is no security in the end, considering we all eventually cease to exist. Some find this depressing and disappointing. I find it empowering. The Zen koan in my signature deals with this problem. Perhaps you're better off consulting people who hold the same viewpoint as me, but are much more intelligent and well-spoken. Great speakers and thinkers from ancient China to the 20th century. Do some digging yourself. Or you've wasted my time and you're not at all interested. Then keep doing you. It really doesn't matter.