What I (and I think my atheist FRiends) are saying is that there is no purpose that's injected into us from outside - even from God Himself if he really did exist and was the Creator.Or is the point that there is no purpose to people in general?
What we end up with is a faith that there is no God and no purpose to their existence.
Fortunately, you are wrong. Unfortunately many people hold this faith.
Our whole structure of individual rights is based on the premise that each one of us decides our own purposes. Just because my parents intentionally decided to have a baby 45.75 years ago doesn't mean I was obligated to get a college degree in the humanities, marry a rich Catholic man in a nice Church wedding & then quit my secretarial job to become a good housewife to my husband & half a dozen kids like they had hoped.
Similarly, those southern blacks who were born on slave breeding plantations only existed because the slave owners intentionally had their slaves breed offspring, so that they would have more slaves to sell. Did those people have an obligation to carry out their externally-imposed purpose?
Similarly, Michael Jackson got some women to intentionally create little children for him...
No, our whole structure of individual rights is based on he premise that they are endowed by Our Creator.
You really believe on the premise that each one of us decides our own purpose? Suppose a sick person decides his purpose is to slaughter babies? You'd argue that he was violating the babies rights, and of courseheI would be.
But that's only because God endows us with these rights. According to his own lights he'd be fulfilling his self-defined purpose.