I was thinking for a moment and in that moment I found something utterly chilling.

Think for a moment if you will, what if this is all there is. I know that we in speaking of afterlives and whatnot we may believe there is nothing beyond this world. However, even those who do not believe have a tendency to put it in the back of their minds.

In some ways one might say that our minds trick ourselves into believing there is something beyond this to help cope with the utter hopelessness of the ideal that when we die we are nothing more then dust.

So what is the significance of today, of tomorrow? Our lifetimes seem but a fleeting bliss, a small moment in time in which we exist. How will you spend that time?

There are no guarantee's in life. There is no promise you will to see tomorrow nor any guarantee that you live forever. You only exist in the moment, every breath, every sense is a moment in which you are alive and it is beyond precious.

At the end of his life, Leonardo asked what the purpose of it all was, what was the point in doing what he did.

I do not have all the answers, I cannot definitively guarantee an argument for or against the idea of life after death. But I do know one thing, far too much of life is wasted.

With no guarantee's we will live to see tomorrow or that we should live after death, perhaps this gives us the opportunity to appreciate life. Lets not waste another second of it shall we?

I faced zero point kind of death about a year ago. At first it was hard. Kind of depressing but after a while it just becomes reality that you need to accept. It is one of the major aspects of human psyche that leads people to error and also among there there are fear of chaos and fear of meaninglessness. We have strong desire for the three. Also we have strong desire for the divine. All these things lead nothing then biast interpritation of reality. Until you transcend all those fear, you will never get to the truth.

Here are a few things that might help if you decide to go that direction.

I. It is because life is meaningless in itself that we are free to give it any meaning we want.
Here are some examples of meaning of life.
1. Experience itself(it could be anywhere from looking at a beautiful sunset to creatively expressing yourself.
If you would not be born, the only person who would miss you would be you. You are lucky to be able to expirience as a self consciousness and that it a huge meaning in itself. Being able to be creative, loving, friendship, logics, knowledge. There are plenty of meaning in just expirience. You can choose to be painter and just the expirience of expressing yourself, no metter how much you suck is amazing and is your meaning that you gave your life.

2. Second meaning is your goals. It can be helping the future generations, painting a painting, understanding the world, or making shit load of money. The list is huge.

3. If you are suffering, your meaning might be to identify as a hero and challenge yourself to take the suffering nobly.
(most of these are Viktor Frankls ideas)

II. If life had ultimate order, like karma or gods punishment or judgment of any kind- we would be slaves. If we were born with a fate, karma, and so on we would be nothing more then puppets to a god or universal rules or w.e. But it is because there is no order and no "fairness" but only indifference of the universe and thus the feeling of absurd, that we are able to be completely free. There is nothing that stops you from making a sin except your own choice. Accepting that freedom and responsibility that comes with it is 100 times better then living in a fear world of god and order which is an illusion.(Some Paul Sartes ideas thrown in)

Every existential philosopher will give you his own kind of answer to those questions but the branch of philosopher called existentialism is exactly what you are describing and believe be there are amazing solutions that will set you free.

Also i believe the concept of "wasted time" to be a concept stamping out of our delusion in the divine meaning of some kind that our life adds up to. Without such meaning and it being more like it adds up to nothing...(at least for you) that the terms seems to loose meaning. There is no wasted time, the time is only waisted if you are not acting in accord with your Meaning and Goals.

This term rings a bell here. Seems like this is the central phylosophical point of some kind of social youth happening; probably connected with the gothic movement. There was a poster here who brought the subject to the forum's attention: nightrover. He was very persistant in his indoctrination and he introduced Colin Leslie Dean as the god-killer of all time and the ultimate philosopher in human history. I wonder what happened to him! http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books...rationality.pdf and

http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?act=S...sult_type=posts

His definition of meaningless became meaningless along with his inability to defend a position.
Tho some concepts have meaning the truth of the underlying nature of reality cannot be brought fully into reason and relative boundaries without severing ones connection to unlimited reality in illusions of a finite reality.
So nightrover can no more convince the world that it is meaningless than anyone can produce God in a form to prove God exists.
One knows or they don't know. Mostly the ones who claim they don't know, just ignore the inevitable and all pervading reality.

I think that in the same way you can know that you know nothing, you can give meaning to the meaningless--unless you are a firm "believer" in logic

It makes life all the more precious, doesn't it? The only way to be fully human is to understand the situation in depth. Down with delusion is all its forms!

Yea I had thought the same thing, in thinking that his is all there is, it makes one appreciate it that much more.

So we see that atheism is actually life-affirming, in contrast to what the religionists would want us to believe. The religions, when examined carefully, can actually be seen to be death cults. This is especially true of the fundamentalists.

Then why is it so hard in this day and age to get the masses off the idea that there is no one up there watching our every move and thought and waiting to judge our actions after we die! You would think that de-evangelization would be the movement of the ages, and instead of Praise The Lord broadcasting network we'd have Praise The Age Of Reason, or something like that. It seems like individual religious experience has a great deal to do with social hypocrasy in the form of morality and self-fulfilment; at least in the west. For example, Erika found the lord because she felt a void in her heart that couldn't be fulfilled with smoking pot or socializing with her friends.

Because it gives them hope...

Then hope is a bad thing.

Atheists aren't exactly life affirming, they are more likely to accept what they experience around them according to what others can affirm to be real in agreement to their own experience.

Religions spring from a deeper connection to the universe than this is all there is or this is as good as it gets. Religions follow experience of that which creates life, and lives beyond death.

Jesus spoke of a greater reality than physical life and death, in the Christed consciousness of his own experience. What followed was Christianity, but what he spoke of he said has existed always and that he was not the owner of consciousness and miracles but only a living example. It could have been called something else, at the time the Nazirites and Essenes called it "The Way."

What followed him was a mass delusion of the interpretation of reality as the people who stood outside of the experience and only fantasized about what they saw and heard.
Beliefs inspired by hope and illusion have twisted the meaning behind the mans words and people today, still search for the true meaning of God and Life.

To this effect the ones who stand outside of either experience watch in disbelief, as superstitious people stand by their beliefs that resonate with illusion rather than truth, killing themselves and others to try and bring God closer to them.

What keeps man interested in religion is the connection everyone has to what has been spoken of by the masters of the past who have themselves lived life connected to eternal life. The resonance behind the truth has always ignited the fires in the hearts of those who are ready to move beyond suffering.

Hope doesn't come from illusion but it is often inspired by the suffering caused by illusion.
Hope is not a useless idea, without hope many of the victims in the concentration camps in Germany during the second world war would have never lived through the ordeal to speak of their experiences.
Without hope man would not seek to find solutions to poverty, disease and social injustice.
If you haven't had an experience of anything other than your life, and that life is full of ups and downs then maybe you are willing to look beyond it to see if there is a possibility of anything greater or a reprieve from the life that you're not happy with.
Atheists don't really deny God, but they do throw tantrums of emotional denial toward the universe because they are angry toward a God that won't meet them at their level of suffering and take it from them. They are more like angry children that ignore their parents until they come to apologize and make them feel better.

Hope is the living connection to what is better than suffering in ignorance, some just fail to use it or follow it far enough to find the way out of the personal holes that are created by belief and anger towards the universe and what is in it when it fails to serve us to satisfaction.

What about faith?

The shoe doesn't fit, so I won't wear it. After one has seen wishful thinking for what it is, one gets on with the needs of life.

Faith can be applied to anything. If you are speaking of Faith as a spiritual belief then faith is often lingering within the concepts of reality.
Faith of an intuitive kind will often travel between concepts and beliefs and a deeper awareness that there is something that supports all concepts and beliefs.

Faith or hope are not by themselves a perfect driving force to move the intellect to a refined level of thought or awareness but they are not useless either.

One always gets on with life unless one gives up on life, but it is what keeps us going that even an atheist cannot deny.
I don't believe Atheists believe in nothing they just don't necessarily approach their deeper concepts or meanings of life through second or third party belief systems.