Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I have motivation and purpose. Theists still have crises of faith, so it doesn't look like much of an improvement. Besides, brainwashing oneself into a belief that I'm glaringly aware is false doesn't sounds like something a "thinking" atheist does.
God as Father and Lord also does not motivate me in particular. If I had reason to believe he existed, I would likely feel smothered and shackled by the existence of such a being. The most Loving and Just a God can be is to effectively not exist and free up the celestial throne for the uplifted humanity.
Of course, you can continue to call "finding value in things out of your reach" faith and "if God is real, it better be me" religion if you want. I find that really tortured and useless for the purpose of explaining power, though.
Most literature isn't purely Godly the way you've picked out the counterexamples to be "purely atheistic". I reject the attempt of Christianity to claim full credit for all those 2500 years.
You’ve already brainwashed yourself into believing that “human flourishing” matters, when objectively it does not as all of humanity will die and be forgotten — mere blip on the timeline, an accident, a nanosecond to eternity’s year. So I’m asserting that there is a superior way for you to brainwash yourself for maximal happiness.
When you imagine the perfect Father-Son relationship, is it one of smothering? If not, then you haven’t even succeeded in imagining a perfectly loving deity, let alone trying out belief. When you imagine perfect justice, do you imagine shackles? If not, you haven’t succeeded in creating in your mind the image of a perfectly just creator. By definition, imagining a perfectly loving deity can’t make you feel smothered. It would make you feel “loved such that there is no greater experience of love”, that’s what perfect means.
No, I do not grant that those are similar types of belief at all. There is no "objective" outside of humanity's scope, therefore by definition it matters. Once the last observer in the universe dies, the universe does not exist and does not matter for all intents and purposes, whether it lasts for a year or an infinity afterwards.
Human flourishing is a real and evident thing, choosing to believe in its importance is an opinion. Choosing to believe into an external source of objectivity, especially deliberately, is self-brainwashing.
The rest is just "you simply haven't prayed hard enough" goalpost moving, not to mention that a perfectly loving being cannot by definition be imagined by an imperfect mind. I suggest you try harder to be a thinking atheist who doesn't need nor want a God to lord over and judge him, and if you can't, well, you're just not thinking hard enough.
Right, it’s a faith statement unevidenced by the atheistic framework. Why an animal would care about “animal species as a whole” does not make sense scientifically in an evolutionary sense. “Thinking atheism” does not support the importance of human flourishing as a personal pursuit.
It’s no less unevidenced than your dogma that a human is motivated by species-global flourishing.
Not at all. You failed the exercise in being able to imagine a “loving God”. That’s not goalpost moving, that’s an inability to understand religious language.
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