How do atheists do life?

[Belacqua]

But for the most part, people come here to hang out and have interesting discussions.

I hope so. Awhile back, on another now-defunct forum, when I asked why people spent so much time focussing on the negative, it was asserted that lurkers would be persuaded, and so their gripes were doing the world a valuable service. That seemed pretty faith-based, to me. I mean, if somebody's making real arguments at least it's possible, but if they're just insulting each other it does nothing. 

What about you? I know you like Plato, but who else do you dig?

It's kind of you to ask!

For the most part I get my philosophy through literature, I guess. My main focus for a long time was the work of William Blake, who was a great thinker. Really second only to Dante as poet-philosopher. A sort of hinge in history, in which the Christian Neoplatonic tradition grows into something like German idealism, mythicizing Kant and Hegel before Kant and Hegel even wrote. His work also has the great advantage of being wildly beautiful and so intentionally difficult as to be nearly incomprehensible. The beauty and difficulty are intrinsic parts of the message. The other Romantics, too, can't be understood without Plato, and can be seen as developing Plato's thought into our own age. 

There are surprising parallels between Blake and Nietzsche. Somebody with more energy than I could write a good book. Both begin with the premise that the phenomenal world is created solely through our imaginations. For Nietzsche, the reality is chaos and the imaginative faculty is "Apollonian." For Blake, the imagination is God himself. Blake is like the optimistic version of Nietzsche, in which the Übermensch is the pure antinomian Christ.

Once you've worked on Blake, you come back to the Bible (which he called "the great code of art") and all the objections to it that the naive atheists make seem irrelevant.