I will respond to dhw's two points: - (a) that nothing matters if there is no just afterlife. Well there certainly isn't any afterlife, and there is a lot of injustice in the world. As we have seen recently natural disasters claim the lives of many who do not deserve to die. Many young people of great promise are cut off by disease or accident before they can achieve anything. This is the way the world works. We can only do what we can to ameliorate it by trying to predict disasters and find cures for illnesses and so on. - But this doesn't mean "nothing matters". One of my favourite sayings is that "beauty is in the eye of the survivor". We must have evolved a capacity for optimism. This may be sorely tried at times, but until it has been defeated by circumstances, it's still the case that "while there's life there's hope". - As for some sort of "ultimate purpose", well we humans are the only known life forms in the universe with self-consciousness, and Earth is the only known planet on which life has developed. Surely the development of our powers of consciousness and the preservation of life are sufficient objectives to be going on with? - (b) that there is no justification for ethics if there is no God. This is naturally a subject that often comes up for discussion among humanists. The "golden rule" in its various formulations (e.g. "do as you would be done by") usually comes up, and can be found in all moral codes ever formulated. - However there are usually considerable disagreements when it comes to detailed situations. Some humanists broadly accept the validity of the non-religious ones among the ten commandments, while others question them. - For example "honour your father and mother" is OK if they have brought you up well, but Philip Larkin's well known poem takes a more jaundiced view, and isn't it normal for children to go through a rebellious phase, all part of finding their own way in the world? - Then again "thou shalt not commit adultery", but relationships can go sour, and isn't it then better to break with the past than to continue to live together in acrimony? - Humanist ethics can be seen in action in the discussions of medical ethics committees. Rather than depending on applying rigid rules, we tend to look at the consequences of actions, in so far as the results can be known in advance.

In saying that if there is no just afterlife, nothing matters, I deserve to be challenged, because I was only thinking in terms of ethics, and I didn't say to whom nothing matters. - If there is no just afterlife, then the only rewards/punishments for good/bad behavior are in this life. This life rarely offers enough rewards/punishments to motivate good behavior except when people are watching. Yes, there's conscience, but any internal conscience can be suppressed by anyone who sees sufficient reason to suppress it. If doing good does not ultimately benefit the doer of it, there is ultimately no reason to do it. Anyone who figures this out, and is sufficiently convinced of no just afterlife has little or no reason to behave ethically (again except for conscience or people watching. However I know an atheist who behaves ethically just to prove he can do it ... at least he appears to behave ethically, and he said that's the reason.) - I should have said this:
If there is no just afterlife, then there is no reason to behave any more ethically than is likely to get you what you want in this life. - Of course, anyone can make up any subjective values they want. So if ethical behavior makes you feel good, then it matters to you for that reason. But if someone else doesn't enjoy ethical behavior, and behaves unethically, you have no objective justification to accuse him of wrong doing, much less punish him. - I also should have specified that if there is no afterlife, then nothing ultimately matters to me, because though I find trivial pleasures in this life, it has not been enough to outweigh the displeasures. And the majority of the rest of animal life also appears to be experiencing more displeasure than pleasure, and appears to be sustained by nothing but fear of death. So if this life is all there is, the creator of it appears to be evil. In this case, the only sensible desire would be for non-existence, which could not even be guaranteed by blowing one's brain out.

dhw, I agree with you here. - For one, atheism is really a position on the belief of god and isn't a religion by any real definition of the word. Cary is giving atheism a definition that doesn't exist. The most neutral definition I've seen for religion was "Man's search for meaning." The definition of Atheism doesn't fit here. Atheism is a one-word description that god does not exist. Theism is exactly the opposite, a one-word description that god(s) exist. They are adjectives, not nouns. (No, I'm not being semantic either.) Atheism's only possible tie to morality would be that it doesn't allow for a theistic basis for universal morality. - There are intrinsic philosophical problems with claims like Cary's... (I'm being generous in not calling them gaping holes.) There are a subset of people that worship gods most would consider as "evil." I have always balked at the notion that 'religions make you moral.' Bull. Ten years ago I did a research paper for school about religion in prison populations. 85% professed some form of Christianity--just as much as the regular U.S. population. However when you looked at atheists (at the time, only 2% of the U.S. population) 0.5% of inmates called themselves atheists. At the time I didn't care so much about looking at the whole population of freethinkers (agnostics/atheists) which I think I just read consists of 15% of the U.S. population. In Japan, the number is 65% atheist/agnostic, and they manage to have a lower crime rate than the U.S. - And what is "moral" anyway... There is a great deal of argument that morals at large are arbitrary. I spent a long time dealing with the problem of moral relativism. - As far as ethics are concerned, I've concocted a proposal for a universal basis in ethics that... no one as of yet has told me has already been thought of or has refuted. Maybe one of you fine people can do one of those here... - Essentially, when observing our species, you almost never see us alone. No one gets to be a hermit in the mountains. This is because in the absence of other people, morals of any kind mean absolutely nothing. If there was only one human being, what purpose does "don't murder" serve? Therefore, morals only have any meaning in the presence of other people. But since we are never in a situation where we're not in the presence of other people, it follows that we cannot escape morality, even if some morals are arbitrary. - Yeah... this is someone that tends to be nihilistic actually stating that there is a universal basis for morality.