RE: Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?
October 25, 2021 at 3:18 pm
(This post was last modified: October 25, 2021 at 4:08 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 24, 2021 at 8:23 am)Ahriman Wrote: The next life will be better than this life. That should come as a relief to many people.
Some of the earliest historic attestations to the existence of a christian religion, for example, lay out how miserable people have been exploited with this premise, yes. Promising relief is just good politics, even if there won't be any relief in mere reality. Predictably, in every society that proposes such - it's the go to excuse for accepting poor circumstances in this life which could be changed. The fantasy of a better world somewhere beyond this world produces the misery which makes it a good sell. That's probably a feature of a life denying ideology like your own, not a bug. In the religious economy, it's an issue of working an engineered and captive market.
@LadyForCamus
Groaning at people is just a part of the full relationship with a thing greater than one's self. If we got started, we'd never find an end to the meaning being asked about - as all ink in all of time has already been spilt and we still come up with novel things to talk about, and novel ways to talk about those things.
As to what it means to say life has meaning..well..depends on who you ask (clearly...). Apparently, if you ask a christian like snow or a new age nut like ahri it means precisely nothing. Opposites day. To a person uncommitted to superstitious interpretations of meaning it just means that life is about something. No matter who you are, no matter whether you see it, no matter whether whatever that is, is satisfying. Whatever relationship a person has to everything else. I would be surprised if my description of what I can surmise about my lifes meaning checks everyone else's box, and I doubt I've noticed all of it. That's probably underneath alot of it. There's just so much to command our notice. The larger all that the sense of the numinous concerns itself with is incomprehensibly vast for any given human mind. Meaning can be given, and we shouldn't discount given meaning, but at least as far as I can tell (and in my own anecdotal experience) it can also be discovered - and it's that latter sort of meaning that religions often seek to claim and monopolize as a lever of authority.
Ultimately, when afflicted people question meaning in the context of atheism, they can only be questioning god-meaning, which is categorically no different than steve-meaning..and not even the kind of meaning they're generally looking to question.
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