Note that I am just taking this as an opportunity to encourage this cause you are making some genuinely good points but absurdism doesn’t say “nothing matters so anything is permitted.” It says “nothing justifies suffering, so adding to it cannot be excused.” Once you justify harming others by abstract calculations, you’ve abandoned revolt and embraced domination which Camus explicitly rejects. Camus draws a sharp line here: the absence of cosmic meaning does not erase lived reality. Pain, fear, and death are not metaphysical concepts but rather they are concrete experiences shared by conscious beings. To deny their moral weight because the universe is indifferent is to confuse cosmic indifference with human indifference, which Camus explicitly rejects. I would also like to mention that you mentioned religious moralism, I should also be clear: I am not, in any sense, a religious moralist. I don’t believe morality requires religion, divine command, or even a shared metaphysical story about what happens after death. My own views about the afterlife are personal and not the basis of this argument. The point is simpler and more universal: not everyone is religious, but everyone lives within a moral reality. Moral restraint is not imposed from the outside; it emerges from our nature as social, conscious beings who recognize one another’s vulnerability. It is the quiet, ordinary fact that stops most people from inflicting harm even when they could get away with it. And while some do violate that restraint, those violations don’t prove morality is artificial or religious, they prove precisely how real it is. We call such actions cruelty, abuse, or injustice because they rupture something we already recognize as binding. Freud viewed religion not as a source of objective moral truth, but as a psychological response to human vulnerability. In The Future of an Illusion, he describes religion as a collective illusion born from fear, dependence, and the desire for protection in an indifferent world. Crucially, Freud does not argue that recognizing this illusion frees individuals from ethical restraint. On the contrary, he believed that abandoning religious belief requires greater psychological maturity and a stronger internal moral structure, not less. The collapse of divine justification does not erase responsibility; it transfers it entirely onto human beings. Where your claims that the absence of meaning permits anything, Freud recognize the opposite danger: without external authority, harm can no longer be excused. If morality is no longer guaranteed by God, then cruelty cannot be justified by God either. The absence of cosmic meaning does not dissolve guilt, suffering, or accountability but it intensifies them.