Atheists: Kinda sucks, doesn't it?

I mean, yeah, but making **** up is just another way of burying your head in the sand and pretending that God will take care of it. Knowing that there's stuff that we can and should do to stop injustice is a reason to try harder toward making the world better.

The people of faith always have a positive outlook. The only issue is that many religious require a lot of negative times to pass before all the positive stuff gets here. So, I would say that bothers them too.

As for punishment from an atheists point of view, I can't tell you what everyone thinks. Nonetheless, the way I see it is that if there is no God then the only law that there is to answer to is human law. I would be pretty upset if I still had to answer to Judge Judy after I died. How about you?

Maybe, but I also think that even though an atheist may not believe that an afterlife will punish you for the life you led on Earth or that some deity is going to judge you or controlling events in the world, that karma (or what goes around, comes around) is signifcant. Because even in this life, the choices you make in the present will have an effect on your future. Personally it wouldn't make me happier or more positive if I believed people were going to suffer for eternity for mistakes they made. I'm okay with punishment, just an eternity of it is a depressing thought.

Nope, not in my case. I'm a realist which means I take the logical, not emotional outlook on the world.

And according to most religions, it doesn't matter how terrible you are, so long as you believe you get into heaven (hence suicide bombers, catholicism's confessions, and christianities viewpoint that humans basically suck so there's no point in trying), so they don't necessarily don't think that every horrible person will suffer in the afterlife.

Not believing in gods is not the same as not believing in justice. We don't think some day they're gonna pay for that in the afterlife, so we know they need to be brought to justice in this life.

Did you know Ratko Mladic finally got arrested? After ten years he is finally going to be brought to justice for his war crimes. Somebody didn't rely on the afterlife to get justice for the victims of Srebrenica, somebody kept looking in this life. Somehow I think that is far more satisfying to those who survived than the empty thought of some kind of punishment in an afterlife.

wow have you got it wrong?!

It is only the atheists that protect morals!

Research shows that the reason humans struggle with emotion to find equitable solutions is pinpointed the region of the brain called the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions.

The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness shows that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity.

The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair. This observation shows our basic impulse to be fair isn't a complicated thing that we learn.

It therefore fully illustrates that all humans have morals controlled by the brain and that Christians are entirely wrong to try and claim morals as their own!!!!

But Christians found a way round it!

Government statistics show that christians are vastly over represented in prisons for sexual, violent and fraudulent crime!

The Catholic church is paying millions in compensation for the sex/pedophile crimes of their priests alone!

Christians are vastly over represented in the divorce courts!

Christians invented the concept of sin and then the idea that you could sin, ask forgiveness, get pardoned and start with a clean sheet!

So no surprise that they are so expert at it is it?!

A Christian is a man that feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday. - Thomas Russell Ybarra

Technically, if you look at life from a true atheist view, nothing is an injustice. There is no God to say what is right or what is wrong so everything would just be nature, survival of the fittest, natural selection, or something like that.. I believe that the personal guilt you are referring to is the Holy Spirit in you telling you that what you are doing is wrong.

I often say "Most people would rather be wrong and feel good about it, than be right and feel bad about it."

Would I like to see bad people get their comeuppance? Sure. But I have a feeling most of them do, one way or another, and not in the "next" life, either. Anyone who is willing to do bad things to get what he wants probably won't be satisfied even if he gets it. All I can do is live my life in a way where I can be proud of my actions, and not worry about the other guy.

I forget who said it, but another good quote is "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel," and I think that's pretty true as well.

I suppose there is a certain distaste in the idea that Hitler, who killed and tortured millions, should only suffer a bullet to the head in payment for his crimes. By all rights he himself should have been tortured severely for his crimes.

It would especially be extraordinarily frustrating to learn that Stalin only had to suffer an illness and then death after all the damage he caused.

As an atheist I feel the world could be better and isn't but it is what it is and I can handle my personal zone.