bartdogg, I'm telling you that I have meaning in my life. You can't tell me that I don't. I know my world view, and I have meaning.

Who's to say that tyranny is immoral? The rest of us that exist say it's immoral. We would not be oppressed and so we do not seek to oppress. There is no absolute moral compass but that does not mean we cannot be moral because there are greatly pragmatic and biological incentives for morality. Morality is just another domain to which we can apply reason and do not need a supreme decider to tell us arbitrarily what our morals ought to be. If you assume for a week that God does not exist, and you read scientific literature in order to answer the questions you believe are now unanswered without God I think you'll find you don't lose too much, and that you gain so much.

When I was younger my parents and I went through a semi-religious phase where we tried out Christianity, and I must say that while I liked it at the start, I was always peeved that nobody at Church was able to answer many of the burning questions I had, being naturally curious about this novel concept. I always got a cop out answer of something like "God works in mysterious ways", or "We can't always see God's plan" or something along that line.

In the end, you stumbled across a very important point. In a sense, we are no different from the rocks or the trees or the birds or the monkeys. In a sense, if you could truly "see", not with these blasted contraptions we call eyes, I might not be able to distinguish between where "I" end, and where "everything else" starts. I would simply see that I am just part of what the whole universe is doing, which is moving particles according to a set of physical laws. The only reason I really see that that set of moving particles is "solid" and I can call a "monkey" is because doing so is advantageous to preservation of the pattern of particles that is me. I only do this because patterns of particles will tend to exist if they happen to behave in a way that is advantageous to their existence. This is not a cold way of looking at the universe, but a unifying way. It sounds New-Agey, but we're all one.

bartdogg,
To me life has intrinsic meaning. To suggest that it must have a "purpose" somehow outside of itself - provided by an outside entity seems a bit odd to me. The universe is infinite and our world is far more than we can possible experience in our short lives... there is an abundance of rich experiences and thoughts and feelings to have and projects to embark upon - why should there be a need for someone at the end of it to hold up a score card (like in the Olympics) with a 9.6 or whatever on it? If I'm only playing for the end of the game then I'm missing out on a huge part of the game itself. Frankly it often strikes me that I live a richer life than many religious folk I know because they seem obsessed with mortality (and their efforts to avoid it through gaining entrance to heaven) and obsessed with what others think and believing that if left to their own devices disaster would ensue. Their heads are not in the game because they are thinking too much about what comes after and what they might do if they were free to act without their moral code book.