I'm not sure what your point is, but if it is to reject the bifurcation proposed in the National Catholic Register article by DeMarco, then I agree.

What is important about you is important about anyone else. This includes the transcendental truths you pass on to the next generation of knowers and learners. And your lack of belief in the unique and supernatural gift of your worth to the world is admirable and typical of the most humble of saints; and it is also untrue.

I believe happiness is wrongheaded scale to base one's value. So I think this dillemma is cow chips (as I do humanist presuppositions). It is just a cultural propoganda buzzword and it is easily attainable with pharmocological agents. I know very wealthy colleagues that have to have psychotropic drugs to maintain their happiness and prisoners that live in a 8' x 10' concrete room that find extraordinarily purposeful lives with out them. Suffering purgates meaningless pursuits.

You say something? I wasn't paying attention....;-)

Which shows atheism is lacking so Agnosticism is better.

All things being equal short of Classical Theism then Agnosticism is better than Atheism.

No, I'm not a so-called strong/gnostic atheist.

Well dude if yer honest yer more of an Agnostic than a strong Atheist..:D Just saying. Cheers guy.

That is where I ripped it off. Note to the Gnus David Nickol does his homework. You lot are disappointing.

Good find. I note that the article describes Somerset Maugham as leading a life of debauchery. It's not hard to see how such a person would be dissatisfied.

Yes, there are people who were raised Christian (Maugham was nominally raised by his uncle, a vicar, after he became orphaned, and he attended an Anglican school were the other boys mocked him) in some sense, gave it up and identified as atheist, and later on returned to Christianity. How many people would go through what is described as Maugham's trajectory if they had not been raised Christian or at least, grown up in a culture where Christianity set the norms?

One can set against the Maugham story the story of huge numbers of ex-Christians, who report how their lives are happier and better centered after they abandoned the Jesus religion.

The reason I said, "Sounds like the kind of thing you'd read in the National Catholic Register," in my first message is because what JtS said sounded like a quotation to my ear. I googled it and found an article called Atheism’s ‘Eccentric’ Nature on the website of the National Catholic Register.

I agree with your assessment.

Jim, what you wrote makes me wonder what you'd say if someone who had never been Catholic, let alone conservative Catholic, announced "the dilemma for the Catholic."

The content of your dilemma applies to no atheist I know. It certainly doesn't apply to me. The problem starts with "he is compelled" (I leave out the "he"). Compelled by whom/what, or by whose system? Not by the atheist's belief system, for the generality of atheists as I know them. This "oscillation" is constructed by someone who has, as far as I can tell, not been an atheist.

Ditto the "unhappily." Sure, I grouse about garbage collection or real estate developers, and I am afraid of the political right wing. But I'm happy trying to live in accordance with human nature and truth the best I understand it. When I die, a few people will mourn for a while, but there is nothing cosmically important about Ficino that isn't important about anyone else, and there is much that is important within this mortal life, as there is about anyone else.