Does atheism lead to nihilism?

[Magical Realist]

Getting over the temporary meaninglessness of our discarded religion for the more substantial and presentist enthusiasm of a "this is it!" life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq0oN8fKWjE

[Zinjanthropos]

Getting over the temporary meaninglessness of our discarded religion for the more substantial and presentist enthusiasm of a "this is it!" life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq0oN8fKWjE

Guys made some good points on things I would wager most atheists have considered. If I had to worship anything it might be the Sun. I’m not much without it…lol

Feel fortunate to have had the chance to look around. Being top predator helped immensely. I feel I’m just another vessel for life because whatever life may be, there seems to be strong evidence that it wants to continue. Why? I don’t know.

[Magical Realist]

The nihilism that happens when one becomes an atheist/agnostic is only a temporary loss of being..It opens us up to the new experience of being IN and a PART of the universe, alive and meaningful as only consciousness can be. Life goes from being an abstraction of one's belief system to a participation in the ongoing emergence of existence.

[C C]

A big problem is that atheism often gets popularly conflated with scientism (and one atheist philosopher even wrote a much criticized book contending that scientism was indeed the proper thought orientation for such). Scientism pretty much rules out any kind of exo-Abrahamic, Eastern or non-Western mysticism slash spirituality as an alternative, too.

But since gods were ultimately just concepts, principles, laws, values, aspects of life/death, and worldly patterns/cycles that were personified... The community of non-theism actually still wallows in and is regulated by such invented ideas slash useful fictions, too -- compliance and commitment to them, even a kind of reverence in terms of political and cultural canon. The difference is that it stops short of the religious anthropomorphism and zoomorphism of those abstractions.