So says the Dali Lama, and several other of his peers.

Would you add, let your happiness show? I love being around happy people, no matter what they believe.

I will only add: ....and to serve others. The Dali Lama said when asked about our purpose here, smiled and said.....to be happy and to serve others. Works for me. I don’t think we need to worry about the philosophers. Just smile.

I do not agree with Epicurus. We have pain and pleasure to act as motivation towards what tends to aid the organism or away from that which harms.
We exist with pleasure and pain, For causes that have nothing to do with philosophical meaning or purpose. It follows a grim tendency to replace gods with ourselves. The purpose and meaning of existence is to make god happy becomes the purpose and meaning of existence is to make us happy? Piffle. It is a sort of sickness I think, to equate our pleasurable or unpleasant moments with the very meaning of existence. Surely as destructive a form of solipsism as any.

William Lane Craig is a blowhard who uses circular arguments to counter any opposition that he is up against. I have seen so many debates with him and I have gotten to the point that I cannot watch any more of his debates. He can't believe half of what he spouts out of his face cavern!

I think the best we (atheists) can hope for is "content." Most of us are educated and intelligent. We see the world as it is; how can that make anyone happy? The only truly happy people I'm aware of are either born-again Christians or mentally challenged (and there's a very fine line there).

WLG always cynically "plays to the base", feeding them what they want to hear. The arrogance of deciding for others what is "pointless"! And the irony of taking the nihilistic view that life is meaningless without THEIR ideology, all while claiming atheists are (the typical Christian stereotype of) nihilists!

Nietzsche was a philosopher and like all philosophers different groups used him for things they wanted to promote. Hitler was a vegetarian and strict non-smoker. Should we eschew those things because they were practiced by a mad man? I know some of the history of Nietzsche and he suffered, as have many important people. I admire a lot of what he said.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
Friedrich Nietzsche

I appreciate how Robert Green Ingersoll put it:
"Justice is the only worship.
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here,
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Wisdom is the science of happiness."

>Nazi-linked ideas of Nietzsche

he was the opposite of a nazi, after his death his sister altered a lot of his unpublished works to make it seem that way.

I was much less happier when I was a Christian than now. It's depressing knowing that you will never be good enough for those pious bigots who populate the churches.

It pisses the hell out of me seeing these "Godly" people explain away their sins, and then in the same breath demonize us who are poor, wrong color, wrong religion, etc.