Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

[Esquilax]

Though a man whose melancholia about life's hardships and brevity arguably represents the mindset that has, throughout written history, plagued the greater part of our species.

True, though I don't find it at all useful to be mired in depression over an event that is completely beyond our control and inevitable. We must accept that it's there and move on. Whenever I read these theistic arguments for why it's so unfulfilling to be an atheist I don't ever really see a legitimate argument for why mortality should be this looming dread that sucks the color out of everything else, I just see a fiat assumption that it must be so based on the only difference between the atheist and the theist as people. It's not so much a presentation that demonstrates that we are unhappy as unbelievers, or an argument for why we should be unhappy, it's just a reflection of the writer's desire that we be less happy than him for having the temerity to disagree with him.

Just look at the quotes in the first post: none of them are arguments, they're just pretty words framed around an observation the writer expects should be true merely because in his personal opinion our position represents something distasteful.

Not that the next day will be exactly like today; that the next day will be. Period. I think it's superficial to regard the apparent nothingness that envelopes material existence for all but the brief moment we are given to experience as irrelevant to the here and now of that experience. For myself anyway, it creates a situation that is far more pessimistic, if not wholly absurd.

It's not so much that it's irrelevant, because I'm not really talking about mortality so much as I am about our reactions to it. Generally speaking I'm able to accept the inevitability of death, and treat my limited time as something of value, whereas so many theists see that same end result as something that mars the entire experience. It's something they think they've escaped from in their chosen belief systems, but merely convincing yourself that the same thing isn't going to happen to you... how is that a compelling argument for that being true?

There's something very unsettling about how well crafted William James' prose is, on this topic. He's turned so much time and energy to describing how hollow atheism must be, spent so much thought on our deaths that his determined foisting of fatalism onto us feels almost lovingly crafted, in a way. Like a perverse little fantasy, that we must be less happy than he, we simply have to have a worldview that leads us to depression because it's not exactly like his!

I dunno, it's just kinda gross to see another human being spend so much time attempting to make other people sad. And that's so much worse for how ineffective the effort turned out to be; it's all just tilting at windmills, but without any apparent conflict in place it's tilting at windmills in order to make the overall quality of life for his fellow human beings worse.