Alex Rosenberg's Atheist Guide's to Reality answers the Big Questions

Is there a God? No.

What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.

What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.

What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

Why am I here? Just dumb luck.

Does prayer work? Of course not.

Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?

Is there free will? Not a chance!

What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.

What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.

Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.

Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.

What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it.

Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.

To Dawkins' Worst Fans, I Say ... (from Cracked.com)

Personally, I don't care whether you believe in God or not. I change my mind on the subject daily. I don't care if you can quote The God Delusion cover to cover as if it were some holy book (although odds are that if you like name-dropping Dawkins every two seconds, you probably haven't even read it). Just do me one favor. If you do quote Dawkins, don't drop the mic and leave the stage like nothing more needs to be said, as if the possibility of the divine -- of some form of something beyond our limited conception -- has been obliterated because a highly educated Englishman has constructed something eloquent, reducing all faith to ignorance and fear. Bertrand Russell did that quite well a century before Dawkins, and millions of believers remain. Some of them have actually read Russell and Dawkins and still think there is much to consider and debate because, after all, we're only talking about a simple thing like the meaning of creation and existence.

From the often hilarious website, Cracked.com and article

Plus another interesting, edifying and amusing article from the same author "4 Things Both Atheists and Believers Need To Stop Saying". An excerpt below commenting on Christopher Hitchen's book "God is not Great":

And given how much we suck, why shut the door completely on the possibility of something in this universe being better, stronger and wiser? Something we could strive to be more like? It's always seemed to me that the most virulent atheists -- not mere nonbelievers, but those who claim to be positive about God's nonexistence and openly hostile to anyone who could think otherwise -- are incapable of believing there could ever be something greater than they. Not a lack of faith so much as humility. Certainly, that's not true for all atheists, but it doesn't help the atheist cause that the three most hostile atheists I can think of are also on the short-list for most overbearingly arrogant.

Thomas Nagel - The Heretic

Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?

"Nagel doesn’t mention the Bible in his new book—or in any of his books, from what I can tell—but among materialists the mere association of a thinking person with the Bible is an insult meant to wound, as Bertie Wooster would say. Directed at Nagel, a self-declared atheist, it is more revealing of the accuser than the accused. The hysterical insults were accompanied by an insistence that the book was so bad it shouldn’t upset anyone... 

...Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, “certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world.”...

...You can sympathize with Leiter and Weisberg for fudging on materialism. As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close."

So what does Thomas Nagel believe (and hope) in? 

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear,” he wrote not long ago in an essay called “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.” “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” 

Nagel believes this “cosmic authority problem” is widely shared among intellectuals, and I believe him. It accounts for the stubbornness with which they cling to materialism—and for the hostility that greets an intellectual who starts to wander off from the herd. Materialism must be true because it “liberates us from religion.” The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable—emotionally, if not intellectually—and the second is untenable. Perhaps matter itself has a bias toward producing conscious creatures. Nature in that case would be “teleological”—not random, not fully subject to chance, but tending toward a particular end. Our mental life would be accounted for—phew!—without reference to God. 

I don’t think Nagel succeeds in finding his Third Way, and I doubt he or his successors ever will, but then I have biases of my own. There’s no doubting the honesty and intellectual courage—the free thinking and ennobling good faith—that shine through his attempt. 

- The rest at Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard 

The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris

"Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul…. Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework – but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to tolerance is not put forward a simple one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is."

-Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Such moral relativism was condemned by Sam Harris as he believed that moral absolutes do actually exist. The question is, how do moral absolutes in the first place? Robin Philips who reviewed the book here, says "Moral absolutes can and do exist, he asserts, but they are rooted in neither God nor biological evolution. Rather, [according to Sam Harris] they are grounded in neuroscience."

The underlying claim is that while science is the best authority on the workings of the physical universe, religion is the best authority on meaning, values, morality, and the good life. I hope to persuade you that this is not only untrue, it could not possibly be true. Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.

 - From the opening chapter of The Moral Landscape

Richard Dawkins was also convinced, endorsing the book with the following quote "I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me.”

So are we like "a phenomenological glockenspiel played by an unseen hand"? 

"From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) that you are for the fact that you were born into this world."

- Sam Harris

A glockenspiel

A Materialist's Apology

 

 

From SMBC via Twentytwowords.com

Atheists vs Dawkins - From an Atheist

"...The more I listened to Dawkins and his colleagues, the more the nature of what has gone wrong with their argument seemed clear. Religion was portrayed as a force of unremitting awfulness, a poisoned root from which no good fruit could grow. It seems to me the work not of a thinker but of any balanced observer to notice that this is not the case. In their insistence to the contrary, a new — if mercifully non-violent — dogma has emerged. And the argument has stalled.

These new atheists remain incapable of getting beyond the question, ‘Is it true?’ They assume that by ‘true’ we agree them to mean ‘literally true’. They also assume that if the answer is ‘no’, then that closes everything. But it does not. Just because something is not literally true does not mean that there is no truth, or worth, in it..."

 Atheists vs Dawkins - Douglas Murray, The Spectator

The Foundation of Unyielding Despair - Bertrand Russell

"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins-all these things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

- Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy

How then does Bertrand Russell define the words that he uses?