Programming is Art

Not really. I'll warrant I've clocked a lot more time on the planet, done a lot more jobs, lived in a lot more countries, studied a lot more philosophies, religions and languages, and learned the hard way through many more relationships and difficult teachers than most people who've passed through this life.

It's my prerogative to determine, and it's fairly trivial to identify, the difference between someone who has trouble forming their thoughts into words, and someone who like this poster is clearly stating an antagonistic and divorced relationship with life itself.

I'm capable and free to judge. Your knee jerk reaction itself is highly suspicious and redolent of someone else who's going through a divorce with living.

You should always question your own interpretation. Yes. When you find some evidence that you may be misunderstanding someone, then yes, you should certainly default to giving them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself whether you've misunderstood something. This is pretty basic ethics and rhetoric.

But the meaning of the poster was quite clear. It was absolutist, in fact, and it was nihilistic, derogatory and dismissive toward any notion of intrinsic human value. Wouldn't you agree?

My advice to you would be: When you find yourself intervening in a conversation to support something transparently antihumanistic and evil, by claiming without any basis or merit that the other party in the conversation is misunderstanding it, maybe you should assume that you're failing to understand something.

Sure, but I'm an atheist. I got to being an atheist by growing up in a religious community that I ultimately rejected. But I understand the experience of that which people crave and I understand why they feel sorry for atheists.

I'm not saying a soul is given by God or that one needs to believe anything in order to find a soul in oneself. What I'm saying is that the poster's comment is darkness and hopelessness and a hatred for his own species rolled up into one, and that such a perspective is both painfully inexperienced and profoundly awful for the person and for whoever they are convincing or it, because life contains much more richness (religious or secular) than what is disdained by this person.

What you find condescending in my statement isn't that it's religious, it's that I'm willing to tell them that they're missing out on life. In that respect, I don't mind being condescending, because not all philosophies or ways of living lead to equally happy results.