Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Esquilax]

I just don't get what is so hard to understand about this?

Nor do I, but then, you and I are working from a different basis than theists, who seem to want morality in discrete, concrete edicts, rather than contextually driven principles that need to be reasoned out. If you're trained to think of something as being one way, it must be hard to consider that same thing from a completely different conceptual framework.

Sometimes I get the argument back that this still isn't good enough, presumably because the moral considerations we make based on reality aren't imbued with the same authority that they've come to expect from "deriving" their morality from god, but for one thing, that's hardly our problem. For another, what they're essentially saying is that they're willing to reject a reasonable moral consideration simply because it wasn't said with enough threatening force behind it.

And without a doubt, most theists act according to this for almost every decision they make as a moral agent. Even the driving force behind their moral decisions are the same as ours.

They just overlay their god over their natural empathy, ethics and reciprocity, and give him the credit.

That's basically how god has worked for the entirety of the christian religion. Every iteration of the church just points at things we already know are good, and say "God does that."