I am forced to ride on a top comment because I missed this whole post as I was in New.

This one is my forte, as I was an atheist, and one no longer.

It was mere human philosophy that led me to Christ.

It isn't a matter of simply "without God all is permitted". Voltaire was not as witty as he probably thought he was.

I would say "without God, nothing is permitted".

Why? Look at any society not touched by a God. They aren't many but there have been a few. Absolute power by a few with power over everyone else. Nothing permitted but what the self-established God-King says.

The freedom of the West are the ideals of the West, and they sprang from Christianity. Long before that, the pantheon of Gods the West worshiped did little to stop tyrants from making any rules they chose. But Christianity set rules in stone, put down in books, and when even the Roman Catholic church took it too far with indulgences and the like, it sprang forth the Protestant Reformation.

Laugh at all of it if you will, but if you are an atheist have you seen the end of the tunnel as I have, philosophically, to see the end of existence, the blackness and nothingness and meaningless of what it is to be human without a creator or purpose? Because it is there, even if you want to ignore it.

Yes, we can all agree on religion as a means for having a moral compass to adjust society and thus we have relative rules to live by. Eureka, we have society.

But as individuals, looking ahead, philosophically again. What do you see without a God of some kind? What is the end road? Nothingness. No end, because the beginning was an accident. No creator? No meaning?

So why even have a society at all?

Oh well it was some greater race of life put us here and is watching us. Ok, that is a creator. Any way you slice it.

Oh, well it's a simulation. Still creators.

Well, life is seeded throughout the universe, and life is a part of the universe...ok where did the seeds come from?

Life is chemistry, and it must come forth under the right conditions (I believe this because it best describes our observations) so life was inevitable.

Ok, so why do you have any right over me and why cannot I just make you my slave if I have a bigger gun. Because it is wrong? Says who? Where does right and wrong come into it? What is that? Your idea?

There are many universes and...ok this is lazy science that is actually metaphysics (which religion falls under) posing as science.

"Big Bang!". That's not an answer, it's a partial explanation of a tiny portion of the inflation event we still do not know how to fully explain but probably happened in someway similar to how we see it did but are still missing some things about it, but still does not answer what came before either this mythical singularity or the expansion or bang itself. Just kicking the can down the road to a point in the road we cannot see so we make the excuse that we "can't see it".

Ultimately, something came from nothing at some point. Time started at some point. Mass/Energy started somewhere.

The Metaphysical questions are where did those come from. The Supernatural (which simply means outside of Nature, and Nature means observable natural phenomena) is just an expression for what we don't know and cannot directly observe, including multiverses.

And if we are in that realm now, where we question such things beyond the scope we can make experiments to test, then I ask, what comes next? Heat death or the big snap or whatever theory? And then, in such a universe of accidental interactions, what is life itself? Has it any meaning? And if not, why follow a single rule we have made for ourselves?

So a few can figure out a few things about a universe destined for one type of death or another while most of the rest could care less and die for no reason thinking they led good lives, defined by people who died a thousand years earlier?

Atheists have to be the most obtuse and also selfish people on this planet. Or just stupid and don't realize it. It's one of those.

I'll take arguments about this God or some other God and rules about God and this or that. But completely disallowing for some kind of creator figure without some kind of explanation at all and the monumentally stupid explanations for it that use dogma like multiverse theory but pretending that is science is just the type of boorish bullshit I simply cannot take.