@DangerDave I stand by my comparison, while at the same time realizing it's all relative.

@DangerDave To me, Agnostics do not resort to pat answers and look upon those with 'beliefs' as inherently mistaken.

@DangerDave Out of curiosity, when have you seen any atheists (as opposed to "agnostics" ) recruiting people to burn down churches?

That's usually people of one religion burning a different religion's churches. Both agnostics and atheists, in my experience, simply want to be left well alone.

@DangerDave "Denunciation" is not an "apologetic", there's no evidence that anyone recuited anyone to commit this crime, and it doesn't indicate that the church was targeted "because their god didn't exist"- it's obviously related somehow to the pandemic. And there's no indication of how many were involved, it's as likely to be a lone arsonist as anything.

I don't see how your reference to 1/6 is at all relevant. But kudos for trying, I guess.

@DangerDave It's not irrelevant; condemning someone else's misdeed is the exact opposite of acknowledging or excusing their offense. if your "potential publisher" thinks otherwise, they have their head up their ass, not to put too fine a point on it.

And you will remove anything I have written from whatever you seem to be writing. You DO NOT have permission to quote me in any other format, any more than you would have permission to quote something I said to you in conversation. You are here under false pretenses.

You seem to be ethically challenged, and I suggest your "publisher" needs a dictionary and a lawyer.

@DangerDave It's not your publisher that needs the dictionary, it's you.

Start with looking up "delusions of grandeur". Then consult your mirror.

If nothing matters and you're as sure of it as sure can be, why "live every day the best you can?" It's irrelevant.

@Storm1752 Because, although nothing we do matters in the sense that religion looks at it, the sense that a god is judging us and is going to reward or punish us eternally.... everything we do matters everyday in the real world, to ourselves, to the people around us, to future generations. And since the real world is all that I'm sure exists, that's all that matters.

And if I'm wrong, if there turns out to be some kind of god after all, that god is unworthy if he/she/it expects us to ignore the real needs of real people in favor of some pie-in-the-sky afterlife for which they've given us no evidence. I prefer to go to hell rather than spend eternity with, for example, the God of the Old Testament, who is frankly a tyrant and a monster.

@Paul4747 I'm not saying we develop a conscience because 'god' gives a rat's butt, but because we have an instinctual gravitation toward it, the same gravitational pull which keeps us anchored to the ground and not going flying off into space. My idea is it's all the same thing.

@Storm1752 I simply took issue with your initial posit that atheists are pessimists. I presented you an atheist, humanist, optimistic philosophy. I'm not sure where you're going with it now. You seem to be taking off toward a discussion of the evolutionary roots of morality, which I endorse and which is backed by science, but which I see as irrelevant to the topic you started with.