Carnival mirror

If atheism is true, then there's no guiding, overarching intelligence to coordinate what happens or how we perceive reality. So for all we know, it's like each of us was born in a coma. The world we perceive is a comatose delirium. Indeed, each of us was born into a separate comatose delirium. 

Or, to vary the metaphor, it's like each of us was born standing in front of a mirror. All we perceive is the world reflected in the mirror. And for all we know, it's a carnival mirror. Indeed, each of us was born standing in front of a different carnival mirror. And the other people we see, the "us", aren't real people but belong to the "world", the distortions, of the carnival mirror. 

Consider the horror of that scenario. Stop and think about that nightmarish scenario. (Indeed, a never-ending nightmare is yet another illustration.) Let the horror of that scenario seize you. 

Most atheists (in the West) don't think that way because they operate as if atheism's false and there is a guiding, overarching intelligence to coordinate what happens and how we perceive reality. Buddhism is a prominent exception. Certain strains of Hinduism share the same skepticism because, even though they aren't atheistic, the kind of God they believe in isn't the ultimate reality.

Grieving atheists

@AtheistRepublicWhat is the best thing to say to an atheist who is grieving the loss of a loved one?  

That's a tricky question, and there's more than one way to broach the answer:

i) Is this one atheist taking to another atheist, or a Christian talking to an atheist?

ii) Are the Christian and the atheist on friendly terms?

iii) Is the atheist expecting a word of comfort from the Christian?

iv) There's the danger that the atheist will view the Christian as exploiting the situation. But there are ways to guide the discussion. 

v) It depends on the mood the atheist is in. 

vi) What if atheism has no comforting answer to give in that situation? What if there's no comfort answer to give the atheist? What if the honest answer will be hopeless and depressing? Are you forbidden to give a frank answer if that's depressing and despairing? If you're not allowed to give an atheist honest atheist answers to existential questions, what does that say about atheism when it comes to the issues in life that ultimately matter? 

vii) Instead of attempting to encourage the atheist, supposed a Christian begins with questions. Sometimes it's more effective to asking probing, leading questions rather than spoonfeed him the right answers. That enables him to think it through for himself. Asked him how he feels about the situation. What did the person mean to him? How is his death a personal loss? 

From there the conversation might gravitate to what, if anything, makes the life of the dearly departed important. Was his life important because it was important to decedent or important to others? 

What, if anything, makes human lives important? What if the dearly departed never existed? What difference would that ultimately make? Are we just dandelion puffs blown by the wind? Most never germinate, and those that do merely produce a new generation of dandelion puffs, swaying in the breeze on a dry grassy, forgettable hillside? Repetition for repetition's sake. 

viii) Depending on how the conversation goes, a Christian can ask the atheist if there's a point of unresolvable tension between how the bereaved misses and values his lost loved one and the intrinsic significance of his lost loved one if atheism is true. And if there's a point of unresolvable tension, what gives? Should we cling to the nihilistic consequences  of atheism, or cling to the significance of human lives? If both can't be true, which outlook should take precedence? What's our staring-point? 

If naturalistic evolution is true, then we cherish certain experiences, not because they have intrinsic value, but because natural selection brainwashed us to project illusory value on things with no inherent value inasmuch as that confers a survival advantage on the species. We're the product of mindless, amoral psychological conditioning. 

ix) A standard atheist response is that they continue to live in our hearts and memories. But that's a cheat. They no longer consciously participate in life and love and memory. Your fond memories can't be a substitute for their personal experience. They're gone. 

x) I'm not suggesting Christians always have happy answers. Unless you're a universalist, some stories have bad endings. There is, though, a fundamental difference between hope for some and hope for none. 

In addition, a world of universal oblivion, where all choices good or ill are erased at high tide, is far worse than a moral universe in which some choices have enduring consequences. 

"Death is what gives life meaning"

@SecularOutpost

Death is what gives life meaning.

The fact that life can be lost is what makes life meaningful.

It’s the risk of loss of one’s own life that gives the other things meaning.

https://twitter.com/SecularOutpost/status/1236376219597168640

1. You can file this under: if you want a shallow answer to an existential question, ask an atheist.  

Atheists face a dilemma of their own making. How do they play the losing hand they dealt themselves? Some of them are more forthright about the consequences. By contrast, Jeff's strategy is to make a virtue of necessity.  

Paper thin theology

@RandalRauser

There is no inconsistency between atheism and the existence of objective moral values. So Christians who insist that atheism entails moral relativism or, worse, nihilism, are simply mistaken. Atheists may have various accounts. See, for example, the platonism of Erik Wielenberg.

i) To begin with, Rauser acts like this is just a Christian caricature of atheism. But many atheist thinkers admit that atheism is inconsistent with objective moral values. Is Rauser so uninformed that he doesn't know their own side of the argument? 

ii) Then there's his fallacious appeal to "various accounts," including Wielenberg's platonism. But the fact that some atheists subscribe to moral realism fails to demonstrate that atheism is consistent with moral realism. It just shows you what they believe, not that their belief is true. By the same token, the fact that Wielenberg has an argument for secular moral realism fails to demonstrate that atheism is consistent with objective moral values unless his argument is successful. 

Assumption: if life doesn't go on forever, life is absurd. But why think that? If God created us only to live for 70 years and then extinguish, would our existence be absurd? No. So it doesn't follow that finite existence is, of itself, absurd.

Notice that Rauser offers no argument for his contention. Although I don't think immortality is a sufficient condition for human life to be meaningful (important, worthwhile), it is a necessary condition. Something I have argued for elsewhere. 

iii) But also notice, even by his own reckoning, how little his progressive theology contributes to what matters in life. According to him, God is unnecessary to ground moral realism. And immortality is unnecessary for life to be meaningful. So what does is progressive theology offer that atheism does not? On his view, there seems little to lose if God does not exist. Whether progressive theology is true or false makes little if any difference to what ultimately matters. 

It's no wonder that he's so sympathetic to atheism. From his perspective, there's so little at stake if God does or does not exist. It's no wonder that he constantly plays both sides of the fence. 

Rauser spends most of his time attacking conservative theology and conservative ideology. Although he's fairly clear about what his own political beliefs are, he has very little to say about what progressive theology stands for. 

Living for the moment

Arguing against atheism can pose a bit of a dilemma for a Christian philosopher or apologist. You're having to probe the consequences of a false position. A counterfactual critique. If atheism were true, these would be the consequences (per impossibile counterfactuals and reductio ad absurdum conditionals). If, however, atheism is false, then it's unnatural to have a consistently atheistic outlook. It takes an effort of the imagination to project yourself or immerse yourself into that mindset and take it seriously. To the extent, moreover, that atheism is depressing, there's a disincentive for atheists to take their own position as seriously as they ought. 

Some atheists honestly admit that they dread the prospect of personal oblivion when they die. But other atheists say, or at least feign, no fear of death. Indeed, some assert that the brevity of life and finality of death are what makes life precious. An unrepeatable opportunity. 

Of course, from a Christian standpoint, human beings don't face oblivion when they die. So a Christian apologist is having to explore the consequences of an unreal outcome. And it can be a challenge to fully enter into that artificial perspective. 

Some atheists maintain that our ultimate oblivion has no bearing on what makes life significant, important, or meaningful. What matters is what we do in-between. 

Let's take a comparison. Suppose a 20-year-old goes to the doctor for an unrelated ailment. After some routines diagnostics, he finds out that he has an inoperable brain aneurism. He feels normal. Feels healthy. But he could drop death tomorrow. He won't have a normal lifespan, and he's liable to die sooner rather than later. So that suddenly interjects into his outlook on life a combination of uncertainty and inevitability. He is fated to die young. He has a ticking timebomb in his head. It can detonate at any time, and it will explode. 

Or suppose he's diagnosed with a genetic defect which will become a degenerative illness, like MS, ALS, Parkinson's, or Huntington's disease. At the moment he's healthy and asymptomatic. He has several good years ahead of time.

But in both cases, a dire future casts a baleful shadow on the present. Even though he's healthy now, he knows that he's doomed, and his pitiless foreknowledge can't help but change his outlook on life. Unlike animals, humans psychologically occupy past and future as well as the present. What we think awaits us powerfully affects our capacity for happiness at present. Given a choice, we'd rather be miserable at present but with a happy future than be happy at present but with a miserable future. We'd trade a present good for a future good. And that's not irrational. That's because the present will soon be gone. We can't hold onto the present. It is constantly slipping away. But as long as we last, we will always have the future–for better or worse. When it comes to the value of life, we view the present as an backward extension of the future rather than the future as a forward extension of the present. 

The world's smallest violin

@RandalRauser
I am so angered by Trump supporters who simply cannot be bothered to look at the credible accounts of his 25 accusers. Do they have any clue about the trauma of experiencing sexual assault or sexual harassment? @DrMichaelLBrown you cannot keep ignoring this.

There's no doubt that Rauser has an anger-management problem. He's like a pampered only-child who's used to getting his way from doting parents. So it's aggravating when he finds out that he has so little influence. He conducts ineffectual tirades against his favorite targets, but nothing changes. He's not a player. It's humiliating for someone that judgmental and egoistical to discover how impotent he is. The world doesn't share his overweening sense of self-importance. He's not the cosmic moral arbiter. 

Speaking for myself, one reason I haven't investigated the allegations is that I've heard Trump admit, in a roundabout way, that he's guilty of sexual harassment. But here's the thing:

Even if ail the allegations are true, Trump isn't dangerous to women in general. Basically, he's boorish. 

Far and away the greatest danger to women is coming from secular progressives. That includes all the baby girls who die from abortion and after-birth abortion. Euthanizing elderly women. Hormone blockers and mutilation for adolescent girls who experience temporary gender dysphoria. "Trangender girls/women" decimating women's sports. "Transgender women" invading shelters for battered women, or lockerrooms, or prisons. As well as a nihilistic worldview which fosters depression, substance  abuse, and suicide.  

It's not Trump but the Democrat party, abetted by Silicon Valley, that poses the overwhelming threat to the life and well-being of women and girls. 

But because Rauser is a social and theological progressive, he doesn't perceive a threat from the left. He's largely on board with the social progressive agenda. So he suffers from a myopic outlook, as if the real threat is emanating from the Trump administration. That's why he's so blindly and fanatically one-sided. That's why his indignation is so glaringly selective. 

Zombie preparedness in real life

Horror stories about werewolves, vampires, and zombies allegorize epidemics and pandemics. Werewolves, vampires, and zombies are contagious. Each individual can infect a number of healthy humans. These in turn can infect a number of healthy human beings, so that the initial outbreak can spread at an exponential rate and quickly spiral out of control, leading to the collapse of civilization. 

Werewolves are asymptomatic carriers except during a full moon. Vampires are largely asymptomatic carriers although there are telltale signs if you know what to look for (fangs, aversion to light, lack of vital signs), so they must take precautions to avoid detection. 

Quarantine is a classic response to infectious disease. The success of quarantine depends in part on the incubation period. In some cases you have asymptomatic carriers who unwittingly infect others. By the time they become symptomatic, the disease has spread. It's too late to round them up. 

STDs can be another example of asymptomatic carriers. In some cases the carrier may be aware of the STD, but conceals his condition and continues to infect others.

In scifi lore, werewolves, vampires, and zombies are killed without compunction in part because they are dangerous to humans and in part because they are inhuman or subhuman. Vampires are lucid serial killers. Werewolves have lupine psychology at the time they kill, while zombies operate at an instinctual level.  

Some zombie flicks are comedies while others use the genre for social commentay. Zombie preparedness alerts and kits are humorous. The zombie apocalypse is a humorous trope. 

This is all fictional (except for STDs) but it has real-world counterparts. As I write, we are witnessing the Coronavirus. It remains to be seen how damaging that outbreak will be. 

Because we're social creatures, many humans have compassion for the sick and injured. That, however, depends on whether the sick and injured are perceived as posing a threat to healthy members of the population. 

Quarantine is a classic response to outbreak but quarantine isn't risk free because it requires some contact between the sick and the healthy. The OT has quarantine laws. It was humanitarian.

A more ruthless impulse is to contain an outbreak by killing the infected. And since carriers may be asymptotic, to kill everyone within a designated zone to provide a margin for error. A fictional example is 28 Weeks Later.

In an atheist regime like Red China, we see real-world analogies. The idea of risking your life to nurse the sick is a very Christian impulse. It taps into moral heroism. And it makes sense if you can afford to die because this life is not all there is. 

But atheists don't have that luxury. So the gov't is welding residential buildings closed. Sealing all the residents inside, sick and healthy alike, to die en masse from disease or starvation, dehydration, and lack of sanitation. 

Behold the beauty of atheism

See how an atheist regime deals with an epidemic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJTDeh88hww

https://twitter.com/EpochTimesChina/status/1227281259853950977

Traditionally, Christians founded the hospitals. Caring for the sick was very hazardous before the advent of antibiotics and antivirals since the caretaker could easily become infected and die from the same contagious disease. It takes faith and courage to care for patients with a life-threatening disease if that's life-threatening to the caregiver. Whether you're prepared to risk your own life to nurse others back to health depends in part on whether you think this life is all there is. This is an acid test of atheism. 

Due to sin, there are cowardly Christians. Due to common grace, there are courageous atheists. But I'm remarking on the logical outworking of competing worldviews. This is the same regime that engages in involuntary organ harvesting. 

Adventures in atheism

As much of the intelligentsia become increasingly anti-Christian, we see the outworking of atheism in its increasingly brutal, vicious consequences.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-ahuman-manifesto-9781350081116/

The Ahuman Manifesto

Activism for the End of the Anthropocene

By: Patricia MacCormack

About The Ahuman Manifesto

We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of “human” into question. 

It is against this context that Patricia McCormack delivers her expert justification for the “ahuman”. An alternative to “posthuman” thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn't dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.

In order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in the world, this book explores five key contemporary themes:

· Identity

· Spirituality

· Art

· Death

· The apocalypse

Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas and addressing specifically modern phenomena like death cults, intersectional identity politics and capitalist enslavement of human and nonhuman organisms to the point of 'zombiedom', The Ahuman Manifesto navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is so that we can actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), and with passion and grace, toward a new world.

Reviews

“Patricia MacCormack goes relentessly beyond ”just” deconstructing anthropocentrism and dismantling multispecies extinction caused by human dominance in the Anthropocene. The manifesto is not only theorizing, but com/passionately calling for direct abolitionist action for the other at the expense of the (human) self. Trembling with joyful energy and critically affirmative insights, this manifesto encourages us to engage in ahuman arts&activist practices, inspired by queer feminist (secular) spirituality), and death activism.” –  Nina Lykke, Professor of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden

“This beautiful book is both a passionate, insightful meditation on the world we actually live in, and a radical call to action. Is it even possible for us to stop being human, to let multiple beings flourish without reducing them to means for our own selfish ends? Reading this book, thinking with it and about it, and responding openly to it, is absolutely essential.” –  Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA

“This book is a delightful provocation and invitation: to imagine a world without humans and to think of what we can do to get there. It is an urgent call for action. A joyful, lucid, fiercely intelligent call to readers to hope and work for a future not for themselves, but for the thriving of all nonhuman life. Engaging with this book will be a transformative experience. One cannot see the world or oneself in the same way after reading it.” –  Christine Daigle, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute, Brock University, Canada

“Patricia MacCormack's splendid refusal to nuance her intent in The Ahuman Manifesto will both intrigue and infuriate. As a vegan abolitionist/extinctionist, she provides an unrelenting and exacting take down of the violent self-interest of the human species, and offers a call to ethical action best described as eating the Anthropocene.” –  Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University, Sweden

Ethics for atheists

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/ethics-for-atheists/

Does God have a purpose in life?

On a theistic view, there is no objective purpose of *God’s* life: there is no ‘Super-God’ to give God purpose in God’s life. Poor God has to choose His own purpose in life. @RFupdates is simply pushing the problem back a step. https://t.co/kTrneRRGVM

— Secular Outpost (@SecularOutpost) October 27, 2019

@SecularOutpost

 On a theistic view, there is no objective purpose of God’s life: there is no ‘Super-God’ to give God purpose in God’s life. Poor God has to choose His own purpose in life. @RFupdates is simply pushing the problem back a step.

This is Jeff Lowder's attempt to be clever and turn tables on the argument. But his arguments aren't improving with age. It's such a confused, and simplistic riposte. 

1. On the face of it, Jeff is laboring to mount an argument from analogy. Either the principle holds true in both cases or not at all. But what could that mean?

2. Human beings are contingent, needy creatures. Physically dependent on their environment. For instance, we can only survive and thrive within a very narrow temperature range.

In addition, we're social creatures with emotional needs. Including the need to touch and be touched by other human beings. 

Human beings are not self-contained units whose needs are internally supplied and satisfied. In the nature of the case we require things outside ourselves to provide for our emotional needs and personal fulfillment. 

3. How is that supposed to be comparable to God? A self-contained being who is complete in himself? An being who needs nothing outside himself to supplement himself? A timeless agent who has no unrealized potential. No longings. No impediments. 

4. To say humans need to have a purpose in life doesn't imply that God needs to have a purpose in life, as if God needs something to give his life direction or satisfaction from one day to the next. In classical theism, God isn't that kind of being. 

5. In addition, while the debate is typically framed in terms of what makes life "meaningful," there's more than one concept in play:

There's the question of what, if anything, makes an individual life important. That's distinct from personal fulfillment. Your life can be important even if you're unfulfilled or dissatisfied. 

Is life worthwhile? That's ambiguous. In one respect life is potentially worthwhile, but some people treat the gift of life as worthless because they have nothing adequate to live for. 

6. Is immortality a necessary condition for life to be important? 

7. What makes life fulfilling? What ought to make life fulfilling? If I lose everything I care about, is that fulfilling?

And if what I care about is merely the way my brain was wired by a mechanical process without wisdom or benevolence, is that meaningful? Or is that hollow and arbitrary? 

What makes anything good? Is it just an illusion we project onto an indifferent reality? 

Chinese organ-harvesting

Communist Chinese organ-harvesting is a diabolical, but clarifying illustration of consistent atheism. Human beings are just meat machines with an expiration date, manufactured other meat machines. The stronger machines strip the weaker machines for spare parts. There is no good or evil, right or wrong, just the powerful and the powerless. Unsentimental atheism.

"Marvel movies aren't cinema"

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainment/indepth/martin-scorsese-i-said-marvel-movies-arent-cinema-let-me-explain/ar-AAJSMU9

He's a great filmmaker, so his commentary is insightful. Mind you, I just don't care for the subject matter of most of his films. An exception is Silence. Two quick points:

1. First of all, there's the artist who's the primary audience for his own work. He writes fiction or makes movies which reflect what he cares about, what's important to him. In the case of a great artist, that indirectly appeals to many others, although in some cases the work is for connoisseurs. 

That's in contrast to stuff that's made to sell. Where the creators are thinking all along, how will this play? They begin with a target audience, and work back from there. 

2. Good art or great art is idealistic. It presumes that life is worthwhile. So quality matters. 

But consistent secularism cuts the nerve of artistic idealism. And if there is no immortality, and what we value is merely the instinctive byproduct of blind evolution, then everything is ephemeral. It's silly to be a serious artist. Nothing endures. 

So why not go for the buck? Quick money? Forgettable films? 

Good or great art is an act of faith, even if the artist isn't consciously Christian. But secularism erodes the faith necessary to create good or great art. It replaces faith with cynicism. 

At the moment I'm not taking a position on Marvel movies, but just making a general observation that's pertinent to all kinds of movies. 

Where was God?

As I've explained before, the problem of evil in general, in the stereotypical formulation, has no traction for me. But I find certain kinds of examples personally aggravating. Cases like James Younger are examples where the problem of evil has some emotional pull for me. 

The dilemma is that, in many situations, God doesn't protect the innocent and he doesn't enable others to protect the innocent. God doesn't use his power to intervene, and he doesn't empower others to take up the slack. Now this particular case may eventually get better, but there are other cases like it without any mitigation (in this life).  

But having said all that, it's not as if examples like this drive me into the arms of atheism, or make me even slightly sympathetic to atheism. For one thing, secular progressives are spearheading this atrocity. Evil can't push me into the arms of atheism when atheism is itself a major source of evil. 

It boils down to three options: God, Satan, or atheism. But atheism is diabolical. And it hardly makes sense to switch sides from God to the Devil because of evil–when evil is Satanic. So however vexing the problem of evil can be, God remains the only option, the only ultimate solution. 

Infinite resignation

Here is an interview with Eugene Thacker.

Thacker is an anti-human and nihilist philosopher. He originally comes from a comparative literature background.

Moreover his work In the Dust of this Planet has influenced the writers for the television series True Detective, a series about a pair of detectives chasing a serial killer across many years, a series which is itself awash in nihilism, especially Matthew McConaughey's character. In this respect, Thacker is kindred spirit to David Benatar (Better to Have Never Been?) and Jim Crawford (Confessions of an Antinatalist).

Movies as mirrors

T.J. Lewis 

Parents:

JOKER IS NOT A KID MOVIE and I’m not comfortable saying it’s okay for teens either. I saw both (including a baby) in the theatre last night, despite AMC having signs warning “this is not a superhero movie.”

It is getting RAVE reviews for the acting and storyline, but
it is NOT entertaining. It’s graphic, twisted, and it works very hard to make you sympathetic toward a psychopath and to make his actions 1) justifiable & 2) amusing.

There is no Batman “here I come to save the day” moment...there’s nothing but chaos and people cheering it on. Case in point, after one murder, the crowd I was with laughed hysterically because another very vulnerable character was forced to watch.

It does paint vividly the severe need to care for those with mental illness well, but we shouldn’t need a movie to tell us that. We only need to watch the news. 

Moral without God

Many notable atheists thinkers are avowed moral relativists or nihilists. However, there are atheists, especially pop atheists, who say we can be moral without God. Indeed, we can be more virtuous without God because Christian ethics is so deplorable.

Christian philosophers and apologists usually counter that atheists who say we can be moral miss the point. They concede that people can be moral without believing in God. The point, rather, is that morality can't be justified apart from divine creation and revelation. 

That's true, but it lets atheists off the hook too easily. From a Christian standpoint, the examples of virtuous atheists are typically atheists raised in a culturally Christian nation. Even though they repudiated Christianity, their social mores were conditioned by Christian values. When, however, we look at social ethics in pre-Christian cultures or secular regimes, or the modern Democrat party, we witness massive cruelty. 

We are most hopeless who once had hope

At the luncheon the day before Encaenia, [Graham] Greene make a remark which had a lasting effect on my life. Greene and myself, and another guest, the Oxford publisher Dan Davin, were all, to varying edges, lapsed Catholics. The conversation turned to the following question. Since, to the unbeliever, faith is only a delusion, why do those who have given up their faith feel a sense of loss? Greene quoted the words:

Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope

We are most hopeless who had once most hope,

We are most wretched that had most believed.

[Easter Day, Arthur Hugh Clough]

A. Kenny, Brief Encounters (SPCK 2018), 174.

Imagine a war orphan. He's been stuck in the orphanage for 3 years. He was told his parents died in a bombing. Then one day, out of the blue, the superintendent tells him it was a case of mistaken identity. His parent are still alive. The fog of war separated them from their young son, but they are coming back for him. He's deliriously happy. 

Then the next day the superintended tells him, sorry, it was a mixup. Indeed, the parents of an orphan survived, but it was the parents of a different orphan. 

Now he's worse off that before he got his hopes up. He'd be better off if he never had his hopes dashed. The disappointment is inconsolable. 

Loss of faith means there's aways the invidious comparison in the back of one's mind between something indescribably better and what you're left with. If you never had the hope of heaven, that would be bad enough, but to have it and lose it is so much worse. It spoils you for anything less. It was just within reach, then snatched away. Like torturing an inmate with false hopes of early release. Dangle it before his eyes, then whisk it away. 

100 things to do before you die

Years ago there was a "reality" TV show about four young guys traveling the country. The premise was crossing off a list of 100 things to do before you die. It became a bestselling book.

That's actually a good question everyone should ask themselves. What do you want to do before you die? If you made a wish list of stuff  to do before you die, what would be on the list? 

The problem, though, is while it's an important question, the answers are only as good as the respondent's worldview. For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buried_Life#The_Original_List

Having posed a good question, they have no good answers. It comes down to filler. They have nothing worthwhile to live for.

When I was a boy, back in the 60s, I remember watching an interview with Richard Basehart. He was a ubiquitous voice actor and character actor in film and TV. I knew him from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. 

He said something I'll never forget. I don't remember the exact words, but he had a pithy statement about his philosophy of life: it's just about beating the odds of your father's premature ejaculation. 

That was his worldview. That was his answer to the big meaning of life question.

At the time it was a shocking thing to say because back in those days people weren't normally that explicit on national television. It wouldn't have the same shock value today. At that age the statement might have passed over my head, but I happened to be watching the interview with my father, and his surprised reaction made it memorable. That's why it stuck in my mind. Whether I understood it at the time, it stayed with me.

It's a frank, unsparing view of human existence in a godless universe. Not the sort of slogan the Atheist Bus Campaign will run on. 

Stain remover for bootlickers

I wish Christians would stop saying that atheism entails the rejection of objective moral value. It entails the rejection of God. But non-theistic theories of objective moral value (at least qua the theism of Judaism/Christianity/Islam) have been around since the ancient Greeks.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 7, 2019

Rauser is such a bootlicker. His tongue is black and brown from shoe polish.

Yes, there are secular theories of moral realism. That doesn't mean they are successful.