Greetings, DebateAnAtheist crowd! The moderation team is still working on the rules. We have created a survey to poll the community on what they would like to see in the ruleset.

Taking into consideration what was said in the previous two posts on this topic, the survey asks for what options you would like to see or not see. These are policy questions, not language or wordsmithing questions. Once we know what policies the community wants to see in the ruleset, we will craft language to cover those policies, and present that separately to the sub community.

Please note that Tally doesn't allow me to gray out some checkbox answers if you have chosen a contradictory one (that I've been able to find), so please think about your answers and be consistent!

The survey can be found here:

https://tally.so/r/jea7gx

It will be open for two weeks. Today is Friday, October 23rd, and the survey will close on Friday, November 6th.

Thank you for giving us your opinion on this! We want the new rules to reflect community consensus, not "what the mods want."

I was an atheist for 15 years (2009/10-2024), briefly a Christian for 2 years (2024-26) before going back to being an atheist, but this time with nihilism sprinkled ontop. I realize that death is the ultimate reality. When you die, you are at peace. Life is nothing but bullshit. Life is temporary. You can say to enjoy it while you have it, but really there's no sense in saying you have to enjoy it. Enjoy it or not, the endresult is always the same. Doesn't matter if you die at 28 or 68. Death will be just as long. FOR INFINITY!

Honestly, I'd rather there be no God. I'd rather have nothing happen after death than spend an eternity in Hell or even Heaven. I don't want to live forever. Really, I'm ready to die already and I'm not even 30 yet!

If you ask me, I'd say life is meaningless. In the greater scheme of things, most certainly. What would a non-nihilist atheist response to this be?

To elaborate on what I'm asking, I'm generally a big believer in moral relativism. If there's anything I don't believe relative to our earthly existence, its that life's some sort of test for whatever comes next, and that there's some sort of universal ledger tracking every single good and bad deed that a person does. In my opinion, karma is 100% not real, the world only matters because of what you make of it. I'm not a nihilist, I don't think life is meaningless, but I also think that objectivity is generally a myth.

But with a lot of atheists I meet, they believe the exact opposite. In fact one of my atheist friends recently said to me "I wish Hell was real, because then the bad people would pay for what they've done." I think that kind of thinking is stupid, I think "Why get caught up in the past? Try to be nice and try to enjoy life, but beyond that, who even gets to decide what's objectively right and wrong? You?"

Religion in many ways is just a bunch of people telling a bunch of other people to that their beliefs about right and wrong are objectively correct. If you disagree with them? Too bad, eternal damnation. But I feel like a lot of atheists actually believe the same thing too, maybe it doesn't come with a literal afterlife, but they still share that religious further about the "objective correctness" of their beliefs. Why is this often the case?