RE: If Life is Meaningless Anyway, then What's Wrong with Religion?
September 22, 2016 at 5:35 pm
(This post was last modified: September 22, 2016 at 5:36 pm by InquiringMind.)
(September 22, 2016 at 5:10 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: I think my comment on a separate thread is relevant:
A non-believer can feel proximate meaning and find a local sense of purpose in things such as their work, community, and family. Perhaps that is enough for some. I wish you well. At the same time atheism precludes any possibility of ultimate purpose or significance – “All we are is dust in the wind” etc. etc. A secular sense of purpose is tied to having some external legacy or achievement to show for your life whereas a believer feels assured that their life matters, somehow, even if they left no lasting legacy (and for most folks what legacy truly lasts for very long). For Christians at least, they can feel significant not because of anything they did but because they know that by His Grace alone God loves them. One line from a hymn simply expresses this notion and goes “Nothing in my hand I bring / only to the Cross I cling.”
Yes, this lasting legacy is the symbolic immortality that I was talking about. But most religious people seem to want both. They still work in the secular world in an effort to leave a secular legacy in addition to their hope for an afterlife. Which may indicate that they do harbor some doubts about whether or not there really is an afterlife. Or it may just be naturally human to want symbolic immortality even if you believe in a literal immortality.
