Is it a constant struggle to keep believing?

[Esquilax]

I would not discount the psychological costs of atheism. To preserve the sense of a life worth living, you must continue living "as if" ontological naturalism was not true like you believe. You live as if you make choices while at the same time believing that everything you think, feel, and do follows deterministically.

Yeah, but it all feels the same to me. What is it you think we'd be missing out on, here? I have the freedom to do what I want to do at any given moment, and irrespective of whether that choice comes from some magic soul, or from neurochemistry shunting hormones and so on around my body, I still want to do it. The chemicals in my body are still a part of me, and besides, they're all any of us have. I'm a compatibilist: yes, I might not have free will in the (strange, nonsensical) way you christians want to phrase it, but from where I'm standing it feels just the same, so why should I bother worrying about it?

You also act as if the things you do have meaning while accepting that they have no ultimate significance. You must act as if there was such a thing as human dignity while believing that human life is a complex chemical reaction.

Again, so what? Yes, on a universal scale my actions don't have much (immediately noticeable) meaning, but I don't live at a universal scale. I live on a personal one, the same as everyone else; my actions certainly are significant to the people around me... what more do I need? Leave it to the staggering arrogance of some christians to believe that if their individual actions don't indelibly stamp themselves eternally across the entirety of reality, then everything is meaningless.

And your crack about dignity doesn't follow at all, because you haven't demonstrated at all that the complex chemical reaction called consciousness isn't deserving of dignity to begin with, nor capable of identifying it without a magic space wizard controlling everything. You're just spitting out nonsequiturs, Chad, as though your fiat assertions should actually mean anything.