Meaningfulness v meaninglessness; theism vs atheism;

[dqualk]

Your argument is already seriously illogical. Material in nature =/= No beauty, meaning or love.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is a statement about one's aesthetic attraction to objects concepts or relationships - What difference does the existence of a god make to a person having an aesthetic attraction to something else? Absolutely none.

I mean an ultimately beaitful thing. Not a subjectively beautiful thing. There is nothing that is acutally beautiful in and of itself within atheism.

Love is a set of interrelated emotions, there is the love associated with kinship, the emotion that holds together friendships and wider families, there is the love associated with partnership and sex that binds marriages and there is the love associated with stewardship that gives us reason to care for our children and dependants - The addition of some cosmic being to this equation makes no difference - This question should illustrate that: Does god's love exist without other beings? If that is the case then God loves rocks and hydrogen and vacuum energy and has done so for longer than he ever loved us - If this is the case then love is unimportant and can be applied to the inanimate - If God's love is contingent upon a relationship with other beings then it is no more special than any other love and is contingent upon interaction in the exact same way that human love is.

Well the Triune God has existed from eternity, and within Eternity He has loved within Himself, that is the Father loves the Son and gives Him all of Himself; likewise the Son returns this love to the Father in eternal Triune dance. The Holy Spirit is sometimes understood as the manifestation of the love between the Father and Son, but I think you get the gist.

Meaning only exists in a fleeting sense, grounded in and contingent upon our desires. If the lack of cosmic meaning is a concern to you the only response I can think of is "So what?". The fact that you desire some cosmic meaning says naught about whether or not there is one. Given a logical and analytical approach to reality there is none to be found, and we just have to accept that - Reality is what it is regardless of what any of us want it to be - It all comes down to a simple question, do you value comfort or truth? The truth doesn't exist to make us feel good, delusions however do and arise all the time for that exact purpose.

There is no reason to believe that God does not exist. This God, within Christianity, is to be understood as a God not subject to the Temporal realm. In this sense He gives reason and real beauty to the world. He also really loves the world, in an ultimate True sense.

Comfort it is then...

And before you try and claim my life is void of meaning perhaps you would like to make the incredibly obvious distinction between personal meaning and cosmic meaning. The absence of cosmic meaning does nothing to diminish the contingent and emergent meaning we experience.

I certainly believe that you experience contingent emergent meaning, that is also returning to nothing, and ultimately is nothing, and therefore I say there is no meaning, but only in the ultimate sense. So I do beleive that you expierence what you feel is reason, and that for the sake of pleasure you buy into this lie. The lie being, that you are actually feeling true ultimate meaning. I acutally believe that you have real meaning to your life, what I mean to say is that within your atheistic system there is no real meaning, that is not ultimately returning to nothing. Within the True reality there is ultimate meaning, of which you partake. Hope that makes some sense...

Oh, reason you say? Perhaps you would like to show us your reasons for thinking that this ultimate being exists, after all, your worldview and all of these supposed benefits like your 'stronger reason from ultimate reason' are entirely contingent upon the presupposition that this being exists. If God does not exist then your 'reason' is bankrupt.

Well, the God-man Jesus Christ told us that it is impossible to approach God apart from Faith. Further, Faith is intimately united with Reason. All Reason requires some axiom to rely on that one assumed on faith, or something similar to it. So Faith makes sense to me. At the same time I do not expect you or anyone to beleive it on necessity, as there is nothing that requires that you believe it, except the Faith that you are ultimately meaningful. Not just temporally meaningful. I believe there is something within you yearning for meaning, and desiring a solution to the brokeness of the world. I do not mean to refer to the broken world in a cliche way, I mean to point out that truly brokeness of this world, which we empirically observe, and in which we observe within our self. We observe it within ourself in the sense that we feel lonliness, and a yearning for true love and meaning.

I, in my subjective experience of aesthetics, find the idea of an algorithm creating a hierarchy of complexity to be far more beautiful and profound that any concept of an absent cosmic parent and his 'son' coming to save us from the sin they planned from the dawn of time (everything happens according to God's plan right?).

Your 'Christ-man' is a fantasy and belief in him is something that is entirely unjustified. Enjoy your delusion while it lasts, I will continue to find awe, satisfaction, beauty and meaning in the reality that I am justified in believing, the reality that has more to offer me than I could ever hope to take use of in my fleeting and finite existence.

I am justified in believeing my reality as well. You can not prove to me that God does not exist, and there are many reason, that are not necessarily sound, but are certainly valid, to believe in God.

I find a subjective aesthetics to be nothing more than emptiness and nihil.

The God planning sin bit is a very intense complex issue, that I think is beyond the scope of this forum, just because that is not the point of this post. That issue ultimately hits on the problem of evil. And there are good answers to it. Although, it is true that these are not wholly convincing. My favorite answer to the problem of evil comes from Liebniz's best possible world soultion, which delves into the Christian idea of soul-building (theosis).

In Christ