Fits in nicely with what I said on another thread was the most reasonable way to live if atheism-materialism, and therefore moral nihilism, was true: a selfish, but not psychopathic, hedonist who hypocritically encouraged others to live a moral life. I called him MrHorrid. If I deconverted it is who I would likely become, or at least try to become so I could live most profitably and reasonably.
I think it is naive of you to think that you can predict who you would become with any real accuracy under such circumstances.
Also, our behavior is largely a matter of our emotional reactions to things rather than our reasoning about things.
I can give an example from just last night...
I was at a casino playing blackjack, and the dealer was distributing winnings, and gave me what seemed to me to be double the winnings I was entitled to. Now I'm a dilettante at blackjack, so sometimes I would get unexpectedly large payoffs, so I wasn't sure that I wasn't overlooking some subtlety of the rules or the particular table I was playing at, but after some brief consideration I decided that was unlikely to be the case, and it was more probable that the dealer had made a mistake as I first thought.
By this time there was nothing stopping me from collecting the extra winnings without anyone (besides myself) knowing, and I was quite consciously aware of that. Yet a split second later, I asked the dealer if there was some reason she had given me double winnings. The main reason for that is that it is important to me to feel that I am an honest person.
Is such a motivation "reasonable" on materialistic atheism? I don't know or even particularly care. It is the sort of reasoning that works for this social primate to have self respect.
Now it turned out that the dealer didn't know what happened either, and the player to my left presented an argument from ignorance that the extra chips were probably hers. Being as this casino is in the US deep south, it is most probable that the player who was to my left is a Christian. Yet this player had no qualms about repeatedly trying to lay claim to money she had no good reason to believe herself to be entitled to.
Long story short, the pit boss was called and video reviewed, that showed my understanding of what had happened to be correct. I did feel somewhat bad about disrupting the game for the other players at the table, and perhaps having caused a black mark against the dealer's performance record. But those negative feelings weren't enough to offset the self respect that comes from being honest for me.
So I'm curious Q, as to why you think think that you can predict with any accuracy, how you would behave with a substantially different worldview? What makes you think that you would be able to behave according to some sort of utterly dispassionate view you have of what is rational on materialism?
Do you think it the case for you, that you wouldn't let trivialities (like what leads to you having self respect) affect your decisions? Why think that?
