Atheism: The Ultimate Guide (COMPLETED)

19. Ultimate Morality and Divine Life Purpose

Being an atheist, I get asked about morals and the meaning/purpose of life quite frequently. I've been giving the same answers for a while now, but after hearing many other opinions, mine have changed.

I used to believe that some things were just plain bad and just plain good. For example, I believed murder was ultimately evil. I was then asked by religious people, "how do you know?"

After hearing this, I realized my beliefs were all wrong. Where could I have gotten those morals from? Or better, where could I have gotten the idea that murder was ultimately evil? 

Here are my new and improved ideas about morality and the purpose/meaning of life:

Nothing is ultimately good 

Nothing is ultimately evil

Life has no divine purpose 

Life has no divine meaning 

Those may seem harsh and a bit extreme, and I don't doubt or deny that. Hopefully once I go more in-depth, things will make more sense. 

When I say that nothing is ultimately good or evil, I mean that no action can be considered good or evil in an ultimate sense. If someone is murdered, your own personal moral code can either condemn or condone it, but it doesn't mean that murder is ultimately evil. 

I do not condone murder, nor do I think it is right. 

I just want to make that very clear, because I'm worried my words will be taken out of context and people will think I'm a fan of murder. I am not. I am personally against it, but it doesn't mean it's actually evil.

Since there is/are no god/gods governing the Universe, it's up to humans to keep ourselves alive. The reason many societies condemn murder isn't simply because their god told them to. If everyone in the society killed each other, the society wouldn't survive. 

Those instincts come from our primal states, where we had to do everything possible to stay alive. Killing each other wouldn't help us as a human race advance. 

Same thing goes for things we consider to be good. I personally believe helping someone up after they fall is a good deed, based on my personal, moral code. It doesn't mean that that action is ultimately good, though. Nothing says it is. 

It's rough, it's tough, but it's just the way life is. You get to decide what is right and what is wrong, whatever works for you.

Now, I'm going to get the Hitler comment more than once, and I have before. 

"So, what Hitler did was right because he thought it was?"

I personally believe what Hitler did was utterly and completely evil and wrong. Since there's nothing to tell us what's truly right and wrong, what he did isn't ultimately good or ultimately evil. It sounds horrible when I write it all down, and it is. 

That's just the way life is! The world is a shitty place, and humans have to survive on their own, no gods are here holding our hands as we walk down the slippery slope of life. If you die, you're dead. That's it. If you live long enough, congrats! But then you're dead and it doesn't matter. What matters is what you do with your life to make a difference.

About the meaning of life. You can decide what your own personal meaning of life is. If you want to spend your life helping others, hindering others, go right ahead. It's your life and you choose. There isn't a divine or ultimate purpose in life. 

Humans love to paint themselves as special and better than everything else. We like to claim that we're so special and unique and God created us to be wonderful or whatever, but that's just not the case. 

Humans really don't matter. At all. Imagine the entire Universe as a big haystack filled with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of needles (the needles representing everything in the Universe). Humans wouldn't even account for the tiniest particle on one of the needles. That's how freakishly small we are compared to literally everything else in existence.

So, make the most of your life while you're living it. You only get one chance at life. You can console yourself by pretending there's a magical man watching over you and when you die there's so much more, but some of us have already gotten past that. We've grown up, we've realized that we're not that special. We're completely alone in this harsh, cold, Universe. We don't need to believe in any magical being guiding is along the way, we're strong enough to accept that we're alone and we can do it ourselves. 

We can do it! Humanity has come this far on it's own, we don't need anyone watching over us. 

There isn't anyone. 

If someone's own personal code says their life purpose is killing anyone in sight, that's a shame, for that doesn't help us advance, but nothing tells us it's wrong. It's annoying and a hindrance in humanity's development, but who says it's wrong? Nobody.