Atheism, A Grim Position?

[wiploc]

As I understand atheism, these would be a few of its tenets:

Atheism doesn't have tenets. Atheism is not believing in gods. That's all there is to it. You can find atheists on all sides of every one of your "tenets."

There is no ultimate meaning. Therefore, all lives and events are ultimately meaningless.

I don't know of any atheists who believe that. I think it's just a lie Christians tell about us.

There is no ultimate basis for value. Therefore any moral position is ultimately arbitrary and logically, equally defensible. This means that things like genocide, pedophilia, torture, etc. are equally defensible to any other moral position.

And yet, you don't find atheists saying that. It's just a thing theists say about us. Theists who don't care about truth, that is. Theists who cared about truth would ask an atheist before offering an opinion about what atheists think.*

In the real world, atheists condemn immorality as much as theists do. And they seem to be much better at obeying the law. And if you do disagree with one on a moral question, the atheist will be easier to reason with, because the atheist won't all the time be insisting that something is true because an invisible eccentric says it's true.



*Edited to add: Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting that you are one who doesn't care about truth. You aren't making claims about what we believe without asking. You are here for the purpose of asking what we think.

There is no ultimate intentionality associated with/in reality. Therefore, all events, actions, thoughts and behaviors are determined by chance and necessity. Thus, an individual's thoughts and actions are determined solely by prior causal events and chance.

At last you've got something that may not be based entirely on smoke and mirrors. That is, I suspect that, on average, more atheists than theists take the position that you have described.

But that doesn't make it a tenet of atheism. I believe in free will myself.

At least for me, if I take these atheist positions to their logical conclusion this all seems psychologically pretty grim.

They aren't atheist positions. And they aren't anywhere close to as grim as the Christian position on Hellfire. A world with Hellfire is the worst of all possible worlds. No decent person could possibly want a religion with Hellfire to be true.

I'd be interested in comments why this is not necessarily the case.

You've got 'em. Does it sound to you like I don't have any values?