Are you sure you've resisted your genuine desire to be a smartass? (Your words.) If someone asks "Why?" a bunch of times in a space where everyone's just making claims about their views, I'm going to assume they're being one-- especially when they just finished telling me about how unsafe my assumptions are when they have zero clue what they are. I'll touch on philosophical topics on this forum but I would never dream of getting into some sort of debate here-- I would need to be a masochist
If someone assumes things out of nowhere, that seem very strange, it's second-nature to question these. I merely wished to point out which points exactly I took issue with. When I say your assumptions are unsafe, I was referring to the fact you haven't properly backed them up in my opinion. Knowledge is justified true belief, which is justified on true premises. Even if you justify your belief and it was true, then your justification may be flawed, that is the Gettier problem. Since many of your claims lack a clear-cut justification, I called them unsafe.
"If life has meaning, then life and death both matter."
This makes sense, if you're looking at it from a eurocentric position. Theravada buddhism, unlike Mahayana buddhism, explicitly rejects anything pertaining to life and teaches that life is in essence a vehicle towards annihiliation in nirvana. While Mahayana buddhism places its emphasis on the totality of humanity reaching nirvana, Theravada buddhism is explicit in saying that each person should find it individually. Once you reach actual enlightenment, you might as well therefore die. Similarly, one may argue that it is death that doesn't matter in the case of hinduism, since one is reborn dependent on ones life alone.
"All concious things have meaning."
This is circular logic. You use the answer as an argument supporting your answer.
"Life having no meaning makes ethics incoherent."
Most people saying this presume some prototypical form of utilitarianism, whereby a temporary life of pain or joy becomes nil in comparison to infinity. But utilitarianism is not the only form of ethics or even of consequentialist ethics. If I presume my own freedom through the lack of meaning of life and if I discount a solipsist universe, then taking this freedom from others would be wrong, making kidnapping or murder wrong. Even if you disagree, this is coherent logic. Taoism outright argues for moral nihilism, since people are naturally going to follow a path of good, a philosophy I somewhat agree with from anthropological and biological research.
"It is more morally destabilizing to believe in something than in nothing."
Anomic suicide is the case, where a lack of meaning causes a persons suicide. Fatalistic is the opposite. There aren't any studies on how many people belong to which subtype, but it proves that a lack of meaning can be just as destabilizing as an overbearing meaning. The existence of cults as a means of providing social structures and arbitrary meanings also throw in a monkeywrench. It also misses the point and merely implies that anyone agreeing with you must be some sort of hippie or bum, which is just a lazy ad hominem.
"Nihilists have no problems to fight with."
A lack of meaning doesn't imply a lack of problems. I have depersonalization symptoms, which causes me to feel a lack of meaning or purpose in anything I do. It's not that I have no problems in my life, but that I have no means to fend off those problems. It's utterly debilitating to be powerless against it all. Again, if a lack of meaning was a savior, cults would not try to recruit those, who don't see a meaning in their lives.
"Nihilism is self-defeating, if you scrutinize it."
If I go off of your arguments, then you only said "Nihilism is false, because it is false" and "Nihilists are lazy bums.". The term self-defeating would imply there to be a contradiction within the idea of nihilism, but it simply states a possible case of the universe. I don't see how a universe devoid of an objective meaning would be contradictory. So excuse me if I come off as rude, but I do find this to be lazy reasoning. When I stated my case, I tried to keep it most to factual statements pertaining to the philosophy in question. I further find your point self-defeating, since you accuse nihilists of conflating ethics with meaning, yet you yourself conflate the two. You claim that there must be meaning, since you see ethics as unable to function otherwise. This is literally a conflation of the two.
