A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning

> It would be much nicer if religious people would only use religion to measure those who are part of it, not those who are outside.

Only speaking for Catholicism here, but the fact that official Catholic doctrine touches so heavily on so many areas of life, making objective and universal claims about human nature, means that Catholicism can't help but make assertions about people who aren't Catholic or even Christian. This tends to deeply piss off a lot of people, even when no individual Catholic is actually applying those principles to specific non-Christian individuals. In other words, many people tend to not it when religions have anything to say about people who aren't in that religion.

> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true

Some Christians believe this. Some Christians don't. And some Christians believe something which technically agrees with this, but doesn't actually hold that knowing Jesus by name or having any contact with formal Christianity is essential, which makes it functionally more like the reverse ("people for whom nihilism is true don't know Christ").

Christians, even by the narrow creedal definition, believe lots of different things.

Camus would tell you that by killing yourself, you have utterly failed to embrace the absurd. I would say the same for anyone chasing scientific techno utopias.

I'm an atheist, yes, but I'm hardly living in an echo chamber where I'm only exposed to parodies. I was raised as a Christian (although I was never a believer), live in a majority Christian country and my family as well as many people I interact with in my life are still Christian -- whether they actually believe in it or merely identify as Christian socially.

Most Christians I know are either religious because of personal anecdotes ("I felt like something protected me") or wishful thinking ("There has to be more to it than this") or fear of death ("Death is not the end"). Incidentally, few of them literally believe in the Bible although most of them have apparently accepted it as the window dressing for their own personal convictions.

I have merely skimmed most of the criticisms because as you say, this isn't exactly the place to have in-depth discussions. But it is also not the place to make blanket claims based on your pet religion.

> I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history[..]. There's actual evidence[..].

This isn't evidence. This doesn't even qualify as an eye-witness account. This is what I mean by circular logic: you can't use biblical anecdotes to qualify the validity of biblical anecdotes. You can contrast them with independent data to see whether they are consistent, or you can look at them within the context of the scripture to determine whether they are internally consistent. But you can't validate them.

The Lord of the Rings is internally consistent. Many alternative history novels are internally consistent as well as consistent with a large subset of actual history (at least if the author cared to fact-check). But that doesn't mean they are "true".

The trivial truth about religion is that believers don't believe because of logical arguments. Logical arguments are only used to justify belief after the fact. If there was a consistent argument that "worked", there wouldn't be any atheists left -- and no, the cosmological argument doesn't work either.

Disclosure: I'm a big time nihilist and genuinely take questions like "does the morality of an action propagate at the speed of light," seriously which i encourage everyone who understands relatively to at least consider for a brief time

I don't really agree with much in this post, principally because it's preoccupied by personal meaning, for the individual. Often when reading contemporary philosophical texts you come across this idea of neoliberal logic (try searching google for it as a phrase)--it is, I think, 90% of the time, a nonsense idea used to obscure a bad argument, but in this case I think it applies: it's an atomised way of thinking about people and how they relate to the world. You'll note towards the end that the list of examples given of meaningful objects/activities are all entirely social in nature; except perhaps one, a career, a notion very central to our (neoliberal!) age, which hides is social nature under a cloak of economic relationships. The mention of Marx's idea of alienation is therefore funny to me: although one can understand alienation as the ennui of rote labour, you should remember that the idea is rooted too in commodity fetishism. The mistaking of relationships between people as the relationships between commodities. Each of his examples are, in strange way, social "commodities": abstract objects that an individual "has", and whose use-value is defined from its abilities to grant "meaning" to her, and can be "exchanged" between other individuals so that you might benefit from a fulfilling father-son relationship, or between the collaboration between famous artists, or the networking with workers from a prestigious company.

I say: it is the very relationships between people that are the generators of meaning, and (stands up on soapbox, music swells) that all meaning is rooted in social relationships between people, and that for anything to meaning anything whatsoever is necessarily proof of a relationship between you and some other person who may even be hidden from you. Reading an ancient text is a relationship that stretches back before you were even born: it's not an object that exists as a person does but is as real as a mathematical entity, and its understanding as a thing that can be conceived of in it's own right is the only way to build a worthwhile theory of meaning that is not just a handwavey precursor to information theory and problems of interpretation. Meaning is a relationship between people.

For a better treatment on nihilism--which better reckons on the effect science has on philosophy, or more to say the direction philosophy must take in order to be relevant after the ruin science has made of it--I recommend the work of Ray Brassier, altho it is.. very technical. There's a good interview with him here http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896 and in particular the following quote still lights a fire in my timid heart:

> Like Nietzsche, I think nihilism is a consequence of the ‘will to truth’. But unlike Nietzsche, I do not think nihilism culminates in the claim that there is no truth. Nietzsche conflated truth with meaning, and concluded that since the latter is always a result of human artifice, the former is nothing but a matter of convention. However, once truth is dismissed, all that remains is the difference between empowering and disempowering fictions, where ‘life’ is the fundamental source of empowerment and the ultimate arbiter of the difference between life-enhancing and life-depreciating fictions. Since the abandonment of truth undermines the reason for relinquishing illusion, it ends up licensing the concoction of further fictional narratives, the only requirement for which is that they prove to be ‘life-enhancing’.

> I consider myself a nihilist precisely to the extent that I refuse this Nietzschean solution and continue to believe in the difference between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. In other words, I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition.