If Life is Meaningless Anyway, then What's Wrong with Religion?

[robvalue]

"If life is meaningless..." is itself a meaningless condition. Life is objectively meaningless, but it is subjectively meaningful. You need to pick one, and in either case, the condition is trivially true or false.

I'm seeing the difference between subjective meaning and objective meaning.  That's a key point that I hadn't considered before this discussion.

Awesome

"Meaning" is an abstract valuation, and is user dependent. The same thing can have different meanings to different people, and all those meanings are as valid as each other. Someone, even a god, could tell me what the "meaning" of my life is, but that's just a meaning they have assigned. I can reject it and assign my own.

If we're instead talking about more concrete cause and effect, that's entirely different. My life may have been set up so that it causes various outcomes external to this reality depending on what I do. I wouldn't call this meaning though, any more than the meaning of a calculator is to add up numbers. We can measure and describe things that actually happen and deduce causal links, or we can apply our own abstract valuations. The first is generally objective once a method is agreed, the second is always subjective. For example, morality works the same way. You can't measure morality without first imposing your own subjective standard, which is then useless to anyone who doesn't agree with it.

How to cope with life? This is it. This is all you'll ever get. This is all anyone will get. You've found this out now, while you still have time, rather than coasting through it in a haze of delusion and missing it. This is everything, so make the most of it. Craft your own meaning. To me, I want to make the world a better place, help other people and animals enjoy their one and only existence, and enjoy mine along the way.