Save your money and then cash in, sell all, then travel to India, a place where all the blurring of theism and atheism disappears, there you will find either bliss, or you’ll quickly purchase a ticket back home. Either way, you will change, and I suspect for you, change would be very, very good. (and a bonus, you won’t have to learn a new language)

I think there must be some bad faith in this statement, bad faith that would come out as soon as you were confronted with a cancer diagnosis, or someone with a gun.”

Not exaggerated, no, but somewhat misleading. You see, it would be very unpleasurable for me to have to go through cancer, or any great prolonged period of pain. I would greatly prefer to avoid these situations. The prospect of getting killed by a mugger, by comparison, invokes only a bit of regret about lost potential for further fulfillment. But the death itself has no import in these situations, it’s the quality or length of life that bother me.

To acknowledge one will never know the unknown does not negate the innate quest seeking urge that one finds oneself harboring. I know that for me it would be an impossible quest to climb Mr. Everest, yet the effort and all that one would experience trekking up the foothills of that mount would be of great value to me. Yet also, to sit where one finds oneself and to meditate upon one’s present, would also be of great value to me.

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”—Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD)

Sorry I didn’t clarify my use of “you make the rules.” I am thinking of rule making in the micro sense, as in those free will decisions that we make daily. Certainly didn’t mean that we humans are making the evolutionary rules. Yes, we are constrained by the impositions of the macro world, yet within these constraints, we have a little wiggle room for our free will to fool around with. Believing in a God-created universe does not automatically mean one acknowledges or follows an organized religion. Those are questions for another day or another discussion.

“From the Big Bang (or any other starting point you wish to imagine), you are the results of a chain of a billion events, and here you are, with that backpack of ‘all time’ on your back, every breath you take is that which moves you into the ever present. And now what? With a Godless universe, you make the rules.”

this is exactly wrong. you just described a chain of events that imposes constraints (‘rules’). in a godless universe you have to discover the rules, and you have no say about what they are, reality being a harsh task-master. that includes the rules for interacting successfully (and into your old age) with other chimpanzees, hence the endless variety of social organisation schemas. it’s in a god-filled universe that you get to make the rules, or defer to those who claim to be speaking on behalf a Big Feller. and if you don’t like their big feller, you get to make your own. rule-creation. at its finest.

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

Yes, but this misfortune of continually changing personhood can be offset somewhat by having no life and very bad memory. That’s how I manage.

I think there must be some bad faith in this statement, bad faith that would come out as soon as you were confronted with a cancer diagnosis, or someone with a gun.

That’s not to say that you should be a Christian or even a theist. But the claim above is surely exaggerated.

my clone at 38 also has some good points.

Also, I can’t agree with the sentiment that evolution has any sort of goal. The tides and waters happen to sometimes produce whirlpools and tornados. Evolution happens to sometimes produce sentience. There’s nothing more to it.

Almost what I said I would do if I were an atheist. Seek self fulfillment, or as I would call it, comfort. Okay, I’m still imagining to be an atheist, so I would say that “The survival of the human race” is the underlying ‘goal’ of evolution, and so far, we are the survivors (along with all other current life forms). From the Big Bang (or any other starting point you wish to imagine), you are the results of a chain of a billion events, and here you are, with that backpack of ‘all time’ on your back, every breath you take is that which moves you into the ever present. And now what? With a Godless universe, you make the rules. Well, that is about as much as I can imagine at the moment, for as I said before, if I believed in a Godless universe, I would call all this a cosmic joke. And if I thought that, I’m afraid I’d go mad.

I’m sure other individual atheists could give you a hundred different answers as to what they find meaningful.

“The survival of the human race” is a basically arbitrary goal. It’s one that happens to be more amenable to human psychology than many others, but it’s not priveleged, and it’s not implied by atheism any more than it’s implied by monotheism or pantheism.