Demolishing Triablogue: Answering Steve Hays' alleged "atheist dilemma"

This is my reply to a post by Steve Hays entitled

An atheist dilemma

Posted bysteveat12:19 PM

Militant atheists are duplicitous on what makes life worth living.

Then count me out: what makes life worth living for me is whatever I decide I want to do.

On the one hand they say you don't need God to have a meaningful life. What makes life meaningful is what's meaningful to you. What you personally value.

On the other hand, they attack Christianity for giving believers false hope.

Because obtaining a reason for living from a source that provides only false hope is fraught with peril and likely to subject that person to find life miserable and depressing.  But I admit that some people can live with contradictions and absurdities to a greater degree than I can.

Christians waste the only life they have by banking on the deferred reward of a nonexistent afterlife. They fail to make the most of the only life they will ever have in the here and now through time-consuming religious devotions and prayers and anxieties over sin and sexual inhibitions, because they're staking their ultimate fulfillment on a future payback that will never happen. There is no hereafter, so it's now or never.

Notice, though, that their objection is diametrically opposed to how many atheists justify the significance of their own existence. Many atheists say subjective meaning is sufficient to make life worthwhile. But then, why can't Christians have meaningful lives as Christians, even if (from a secular standpoint) Christianity is false?

As long as you don't become a fanatic like Gene Bridges, Steve Hays, Jason Engwer, James Patrick Holding or other fundamentalists, I see no problem in choosing to find meaning in life through Americanized Christianity.  Given that atheism is true, religious views should be allowed where they don't cause depression.

Sure, it's subjective meaning. It doesn't correspond to objective reality (from a secular standpoint). Yet the same atheists insist that your sense of purpose in life needn't correspond to objective value. Rather, value is what is valuable to each individual.

Granted, if an atheist wants to completely exterminate Christianity from earth, he or she probably hasn't thought about how religion is the opiate of the masses, or how the good of a religion can outweigh its bad.

So why do militant atheists make their mission in life talking Christians out of their faith, or dissuading people from ever considering Christianity in the first place?

Such atheists are likely militant that way because they fear a general Christian faith opens to door to the type of scumbag fanaticism known as fundamentalism.  Mormonism is good for America as long as it isn't taken too seriously, which thankfully most Mormons don't.

Is it because they think Christianity is based on wishful thinking? But what if wishful thinking is what makes you feel that you and your loved ones are important in the grand scheme of things?

What if wishful thinking leads to fanaticism?

An atheist can't object on grounds that that's a sentimental projection, for he that's how he defends his own position.

So the atheist has a dilemma on his hands. If subjective meaning is good enough for atheists, why isn't that good enough for deluded Christians?

Once again, because atheism is true, it makes more sense to ask whether Christianity motivates people to do good things and whether there are versions of it that do more good than bad.  I have no problems with Americanized Christianity; if a person is too immature to come up with their own motive for doing something good with their life without linking it back to Christianity, more power to them.

Christianity is not the problem.  The fundamentalist forms of it, which insult the intelligence of others and create a greater danger of sucking a person into depression and misery, are the problem.