GP: "And by the way, no one has been willing to take on the vexed issue of determinism being a logical consequence of atheism."

Determinism is also the logical consequence of theism. If there is an omniscient, omnipotent god then he will have known everything everyone will do before they do it, and hence people have no free will. If we really do have free will then god cannot know or control what we will do and therefore is neither omniscient nor omnipotent and hence is not a god.

Spinoza once said that the only difference between a man going through life and a stone rolling downhill is that the stone has no illusion it is in charge of its own destiny.

Life does have meaning, the meaning that you give it(as your rolling down the hill). The thing about most athiest is "They know they are living in the illusion that they create for themselves".

They know that it doesn't matter if we kill the last whale or cut down the last tree (Right & Wrong are just collective norms of civil society), but they also acknowledge that if they do, the collection of atoms that temporarily is identified as them will probably disassociate. But the universe(or God)doesn't care.

The truth is that for 99.9% of us, 1000 years from now, nobody will know you existed or cares. Your life path/journey is yours for the making. If you want to rap your life/journey around a 3000 year old fairy tale, who am I to argue between created illussions.

An interesting article.
But I guess it all depends on the individuals perspective on life, if you take Louis Pojman view you would live a life of meaninglessness knowing that nothing really matters in the end. Nick Bostrom put forward a similar view where he said since we live in an infinite universe there is an infinite amount of good and an infinite amount of evil, thus no matter how much good or evil you do it will never change the overall picture.

To conclude that nothing happens to us after death is about as silly as concluding that we go to either heaven or hell after death. The facts are that nobody actually knows and I am 100% sure it’s a whole lot more complicated then what either main stream religious groups champion and what main stream atheist champion.

We cant write the last page of the book of everything until we know the whole picture and I have a nasty feeling that we are only on the first chapter of a multi volumed anthology. Mind you this wont stop those of religious or atheist persuasion from calling the final score after only the first over has been bowled.

I want to see some of the posters above take on the challenge set by Grey. He's shown you the first steps for a rational argument.
Nearly all of the posts so far are just "sound and fury signifying nothing". Read Graham's article again dispassionately and respond to it just as dispassionately.

A long winded exegesis of the now quite common objection to atheism - ie that such a belief takes away any fundamental moral standard from human behaviour, and that in the final analysis the universe is meaningless and none of us gets either punished or rewarded. The author of this piece of claptrap is clearly of the fundamentalist persuasion in that he uses the same basic tactic as did Gish and who knows how many other sunday school teachers, and self styled pastors etc - which is to keep presenting the same tired old argument even though that argument has been routed many times before.
The fact is that the (alleged) lack of an effective morality being available to an atheistic society has been so often refuted that it is pointless to do it again here. I simply refere the writer (or more hopefully the reader) to just about any of the writings of Shermer, Harris, Dennett etc etc (not to mention Socrates, Kant etc) for an intellectually satisfying repudiation of all the tired old cliches in this current essay - I do not have time at this point to argue the matter any further, and it would make no difference to Mr Preston's views if I did so - the essay (slightly re-worded no doubt) would simply turn up somewhere else.
We are then left with the notion of not having that time honoured religious fanatic's virtual 'raison d'etre - ie that punishment will be meeted out to unbeleivers and naughty people in the future, whilst rewards will be available to the good guys - including Mr Preston. I simply comment that the universe is it's own law, and does not adjust itself to any humanised notion of fair play. Get used to it - we are alone and totally responsible for our own comfort in this life - and there is no other life to come, only the oblivion out of which we came prior to birth. Happiness is a human invention - the universe simply doesn't care.

I'll take up the syllogism as summarised by Grey by three propositions.

P1a) Grey's comments are correct in the sense of "as far as we know". However the bracketed elemets are not. Matter and energy (and space-time) are objective facts, but they are not all that exists in the universe (and nor do most atheists claim this).

(P1b) Moral judgements can be formed through mutual consensus of shared norms. This is certainly within our knowledge of the universe, but it it is not a matter of fact, but of norms.

(P1c) Aesthetic expressions expressed through subjective standards of sensuality and beauty also form within the realms of knowledge.

Conclusion: It is not a case of claiming that which is immaterial as belonging to the realm of the theological but rather those things which are pragmatically unverifiable, for example a normative approach to physical world (e.g., "Blue skies are evil"), aesthetic standards to the social world (e.g., "Drink driving laws are beautiful") or factual statements to the personal world (e.g., "You feel 10.5 units")

The following notes, which may assist, come from classes presented at the Melbourne Unitarian Church.

http://melbourneunitarian.org.au/files/philosophy/introphil.doc
http://melbourneunitarian.org.au/files/philosophy/pragmatic.do