Life and meaning

        Our lives have whatever meaning we want to make for them. Mine  includes helping others overcome their superstitions of  the supernatural and the paranormal, what Paul Kurtz calls " The Transcendental Temptation,"  a must read book. Kurtz ever pleas for exuberance.
        Haughty John Haught can ever prattle that why, atheists who see pellucidly  the consequence of atheism acknowledge that ti's bleak. No, they would make a non-sequitur: that Nature gives us no meaning and purpose thus, we have none. John-Paul Sartre, one of those atheists, himself advocates our making our own meanings and purposes
       Thus, Haught muddies the waters to malign atheism.
       Franciso Jose Ayala claims without evidence that we need God to assuage us of  existential angst- the feeling that we just don't have a reason to live without Him and that He^ grounds our values. No!.
        To overcome that angst, get counseling. We ground our own values!
        This one life and our own human purposes and values and humans love suffice; divine  purpose for us and divine love and the future state cannot ground them.
         As He speaks with a forked tongue- all  the thousands of sects claim contradictory views such that none can claim anything about His real meaning. Indeed, our argument from the multiplicity of religions reflect those sects contradictions!

          At sixteen, I had no existential angst to need Him: did he or did He not exist. He doesn't, and my life was the same. Decades later, therapy helped me  to overcome angst, not Sky Pappy!
          We rationalists do fathom theistic angst about becoming godless; people need our counseling. We ever need to meet theistic arguments and their scriptural claims, but our counseling has to go forth! And philosophy and science without emotional input doesn't suffice We ought to  mock their absurdities as Jefferson admonishes us to mock the absurd.
          "Life is its own validation and reward and ultimate meaning to which neither God nor the future  state can further validate.' Inquiring Lynn 

          ^ Ayala