Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[TheRealJoeFish]

There is no lie.
It's only a lie if you deny how you obtained your ethics.

An how does an atheist obtain ethics?

Atheists get their ethics the same way as everyone else - by being taught, and by thinking about the ways their actions affect the world around them, and by taking into account reason and emotion, things like empathy and desire and such - except atheists don't pretend that, instead, they're 'obeying' the commands of some source of ethics on high.

Now, if we're talking about "moral nihilism" as the belief that "all morals are constructed" - that is, there's no external source of morality - I think it's also true that many atheists feel this way (I certainly do), but it doesn't follow as readily as existential nihilism. For example, there seems to be a growing movement of trying to define morality/ethics as something of an emergent property of society or even biology. One could, for example, argue that, even without an objective source of meaning in life, morality can be objectively grounded on human biology.