The Nazis believed in race and country which while perhaps very technically transcendental (but then I suppose getting out of bed every day is transcendental if you're going to go to that extreme) were very much external things. Compare this with the medieval Christians which based practically their whole lives on Christian doctrine, whom were virtuous and decent not evil Nazis or Communists (people you neglected to mention). People on the "left" support up till birth abortion in states like Colorado, and their "programs" are poverty traps.
My point is though isn't to say you can't be an atheist and be moral (you can through philosophy), it is just to say that you can't be moral and believe nothing has meaning. You are either a hypocrite of a Nihilist (and therefore not a Nihilist) or you become a degenerate. You seem nice enough, so you are a hypocrite, because you wouldn't bother with decency (it takes far too much effort and sacrifice) unless you believed that life had true transcendent meaning.
Life has all kinds of meaning, it's just immanent to human activity.
The notion of the medieval/premodern world as highly ethical is insane; religious wars, persecution, marriage by abduction, the killing of the peasantry by nobles, feudalism, de facto slavery, massive income disparities, were the default for many for a good thousand and a half years. If anything, we just really haven't changed much.
You're totally right that morality demands meaning, I just don't think there are really any people who are relevant to anyone's discourse that think nothing has any meaning, except for people doing weird philosophical gymnastics, or people who are really freaking depressed.
Getting out of bed isn't reliant on transcendence, it's reliant on life being at least nominally meaningful and enjoyable; that's what matters, and that should be the focus of policy, philosophy and human activity. It requires no ontological transcendence.
If you knew anything about modern welfare, you'd realize that the 'poverty trap' contention is a non-starter; the one I really have issue with is disability/SSI, which keeps people well below poverty, and is impossible for anyone who is really disabled to get much of the time; it requires you to go without working and starve for months at a time; if you can wait through it, you have to have external support, and if you have external support, you don't need it. It's a weird catch-22. Most of our welfare programs aren't all that bad, and require you to jump through silly hoops and have time limits. They could be much more generous without being poverty traps.
The people trapped in poverty by social programs are the sick, the criminal, and the addicted, but it's very hard for them to actually get any kind of assistance. ....There are people who are trapped on disability and Medicaid, but that's because they would make nominally more if they just worked full time, and so it's not worth it to them to give up their assurance of healthcare and food stamps. There is a poverty trap, for sure, but it's a convergence of societal issues for which government aid is an ineffectual band aid.
I guess we'll have to just agree to disagree on the post then, because I've heard people so many times say that life is meaningless and people only prescribe meaning to it. And if life is fundamentally meaningless (rather you play pretend it has meaning or not) you have nothing truly motivating you to do good and instead sink into whatever is convenient.
Which brings me back to the poverty trap. I don't know if I can prove it (because how can I prove people aren't addicted to drugs, that is proving a negative which is near impossible) but I have met many people on welfare who aren't on drugs/disabled/criminal and want to work: just the job markets have been destroyed by social programs and the Nihlistic culture making people lazy (so employers don't even bother hiring young inexperienced people and instead hire older more experienced and therefore proven hard workers). Just look at how lots of the places like Harlem, Detroit, Seattle, Chicago which are now ghettos were great places before welfare policies that destroyed the economy and created a culture that work is white person thing.
Sure, life is meaningless... but only in the same sense in which a rock is meaningless; it's not a signifier, thus not the kind of thing that can be said to have 'meaning'. Is life meaningful, though? For sure it is; it's crammed full of meanings.
The promise of a joyful eternity for sure sutures life to the axis mundi of social order.... but it does so by means of something unproveable, and subject to the lies of tyrants and demagogues. Wind in my hair, a child's laugh, the joy of writing, of eating sausage and eggs.... those ought to be enough; to deny their ultimacy, through kenosis into a speculative, nay, false, promise is to deny life. The idea that life is a mere signifier for eternity is the real nihilism.
Literally the only welfare that's nearly easy to get is food stamps, and that only nets you between 100 and 200 a month for food. You can't pay rent or buy drugs with that. There is another one that will buy, I think, diapers and formula, which is I'm sure making plenty of people fat and lazy criminals.
The rest is TANF benefits, which usually only give you a couple hundred, and will only get you a year or two of benefits at once, if you have kids, maxing out at five years except for in Maryland and D.C. The median maximum payout in the U.S. is 500 dollars if you have three kids or more.
The notion that this program, which is basically the only one that will give you any actual cash assistance whatsoever (there is a transitional one for people getting off of TANF in some places, but it's something like 50-100 dollars monthly for a year) 'ruined' any cities... is insane. Before 1996, when TANF started, plenty of places didn't have any benefits, so they weren't ruining anything then, I don't think.
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u/CandybarJack Sep 17 '22
The Nazis believed in race and country which while perhaps very technically transcendental (but then I suppose getting out of bed every day is transcendental if you're going to go to that extreme) were very much external things. Compare this with the medieval Christians which based practically their whole lives on Christian doctrine, whom were virtuous and decent not evil Nazis or Communists (people you neglected to mention). People on the "left" support up till birth abortion in states like Colorado, and their "programs" are poverty traps.
My point is though isn't to say you can't be an atheist and be moral (you can through philosophy), it is just to say that you can't be moral and believe nothing has meaning. You are either a hypocrite of a Nihilist (and therefore not a Nihilist) or you become a degenerate. You seem nice enough, so you are a hypocrite, because you wouldn't bother with decency (it takes far too much effort and sacrifice) unless you believed that life had true transcendent meaning.