And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.
Archibald MacLeish: The End of The World
I think the difference between atheism and belief in God, by whom I mean the God of monotheism is most often a difference between people who, at their core, either are willing to accept that they have moral responsibilities and obligations to other People, other living beings and those who would rather not accept that and are willing to give up things in order to deny their moral obligations. That wasn't my discovery, though I came to something like that independently through observation, Nietzsche's demented philosophy of amorality is one of the most explicit articulations of the atheist side of that and long before him Bernard Mandeville and others had gone a long way to that end. Nietzsche had the intellectual integrity or the amoral degeneracy to admit that materialism, scientism, atheism meant people were relieved of the obligation to act morally, though such relief comes with a steep price in that such an intellectual stand cannot be consistent with any kind of meaning or means of valuation of any meaning. To be consistent such an atheist cannot logically claim that their life, the life of their nearest and dearest (if such they retain) of their family, of their university department ( the only two spheres of moral obligations that the popular expert in such good and evil among atheists today, Steven Weinberg, claims for himself) or anything else has any place in a reckoning of good and evil, importance or triviality, meaning and meainglessness. In short, to deny moral obligations that impinge on them, such atheism inevitably reduces the moral obligations that such atheists can claim are owed them by other people who are as freed from moral obligations - or rather any sense of them - that impinge on the libertarian atheist.
Nietzsche did note that there were such atheists who maintained an ever weakening, ever looser sense of moral obligation out of habit and cultural habit but he correctly noted that with such atheism such a sense of moral obligation would, with time, vanish leaving only ruthless power and strength in its place, the very things that moral obligation exists to restrain or overcome.
I don't find most atheists have Nietzsche's honesty about that some who will spout that nihilism as even a scientific claim such as Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell will, at the same time and at complete odds with their science, claim some kind of contradictory morality. That is certainly related to their equally irrational and inconsistent claims made for science which, itself, cannot survive the materialist program of degradation of all human aspirations, including to the quest to obtain knowledge and find meaning. Trump's amoral nihilism is a mild form of what is the consequence of the most popular ideological stand among atheists, vulgar materialism will be more durable than intellectual materialism because all materialism inevitably leads to the reduction of meaning into meaninglessness, even the valuation put on human posterity has proven to be sacrificed on the altar of immorality dedicated to the no-God of atheism. The hardest form of predestination is the atheist nihilist assignment of us all to an oblivion which their belief begins at our conception, at our birth, before we were born, at the Big Bang when everything that happened is, ultimately, held to have been determined, none of it having any meaning, at all.
I see this in a thousand different ways, every week in Trumpian-Putinian-Xiist 2019.
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