What is the point of anything?

[Esquilax]

I've never understood this "what's the point of life, you're just going to die and not remember any of it!" thing that christians have going. I mean, I understand it, in that I understand they're desperate to turn whatever differences in belief there are between theism and atheism into an advantage for them and a disadvantage for us, I understand the appeal to consequences, but the central assertion just doesn't make any sense. Why is something meaningless just because it's finite? Why does something having an end rob it of any value?

The question I ask in response is generally this: why bother eating lunch? Eventually there'll be no food on the plate, you'll just poop it out later, and eventually you won't even remember you've eaten it. I'll usually get a response about how eating helps us to survive, and then the central assertion of the argument fades away, because the theist has just acknowledged that finite things can have value enough to make them worth doing.

The things you do don't gain their meaning from the fact that you think there's an afterlife. Nobody walks out of a movie saying "Wow, I really enjoyed that movie because when I die, I'll live forever!" That's a nonsensical statement. You enjoy the movie because of the things in the movie that are enjoyable. Those things exist independent of your belief in heaven or hell, and that's true of everything on earth. There's simply no need to hitch your enjoyment of life to the idea that life will never end, regardless of the desperate rigor with which theists will try to convince you otherwise; all their arguments are little more than assertions, demands that you take them seriously for no real reason.

There's no need to listen to that until they come up with something more substantial than "someday you'll die, and that's scary."