Atheism, A Grim Position?

[Esquilax]

I notice many theists make morality much more complicated than it needs to be.

I don't quite get the desire to be firmly under some giant thumb, either.

It starts from a premise they never seem prepared to justify "X requires special justification," where special justification can be dressed up in any number of inapplicable terms, like objective, or ultimate, or what have you. That premise lets them pretend that morality is some baffling, pseudo-mystical thing that exists beyond conscious experience as some objective quantity in and of itself. It never seems to occur that, outside of their own presupposed perspective this premise isn't as obviously true as they seem to think it is, but it also has some interesting unspoken corollaries that the theist making the argument seems unwilling to stray from their initial premise to entertain.

For example, morality apparently has no benefits or even effects on the real world to the theist, such that one would want to utilize it; you can see that in Steve's arguments, where every rational consequence of adopting a moral system is dismissed as ungrounded because there is no ultimate grounding, as though those effects cease to exist if it doesn't stem from magic. The fact that Steve seems to think of morality as a quantity removed from human experience, that exerts no pull on people beyond that it is funneled to us via god is a position that's interesting in itself, with plenty of implications worth exploring, but he seems uninterested in even acknowledging that it exists.

After all, this starts with an unjustified premise; it isn't about interrogating morality itself, but picking holes in a brand of morality that the theist himself doesn't adhere to.