Does atheism inspire people?

[Cyberman]

Ok I've just caught up with this thread. Though I don't want to retread ground already broken by others if I can help it, just a couple of points.

First off, re: the whole topic - seems to me like someone is confusing 'religion' with 'spiritual'. I am very nearly as religious as I am an OXO cube, yet I am just as capable of spiritual feelings as the most devout xtian artist. It's simply that I don't feel obliged to constrain my interpretation of those feelings to anything beyond my sense of self. Like everyone else, I can watch a sunset or the night sky, look at a manmade work of art, listen to a piece of music, and have tears streaming down my face because of it. The experience may inspire me to create such works of my own, were I so inclined. My being an atheist isn't even a factor, nor should it be expected to be so.

Next up is the whole 'life's meaning' thing, viz:

The idea that there is no heaven, no hell, no afterlife. I get one life and I'll be damned if I don't make it count.

This is an argument I hear often and makes no logical sense. What do you mean exactly by "make it count" count for what? If this is it, nothing after, then this life is meaningless and any attempt to imbue any meaning is purely delusional, while it may make you feel better its ultimately living a pointless lie. Belief in God and eternal life gives meaning and purpose with consequence to our actions and lives, its internally coherent. Saying life has no meaning then creating meaning is internally incoherent. Faith and doubt are two sides to the same coin, the types who worry me are those with certainty, those who claim they are certain there is no God.

I'll use an analogy based on a subject close to my heart; the more astute of you may just possibly spot a pattern. Let's just for the moment imagine that each of us has only one chance in our entire life to experience true love. One shot to share even a fraction of our threescore-and-ten with our perfect partner. Which makes more sense: that we nurture the relationship, make the most of every moment we have with that person, work to ensure the love we provide them far outweighs any harm we may cause? Or that we waste the experience, treat the person like shit on our shoe, expect them to live like a drudge and cater for our every selfish whim, so as to get the most 'value' from the relationship before they inevitably piss off to someone else?

Finally, there was this:

Well, I would say that the majority of the depictions of religious people in the media, soap operas, films etc these days are always painted as evil, villains etc. I can't think of any instance of modern film etc where the religious person is a good guy!

Really? I can:

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