Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?

[The Grand Nudger]

When you say "we" do you mean a group of specific people or are you referring to Americans in general?  I have to admit that I find myself doing this more and more but I wrote it off as just me getting older and less flexible with life, basically a coping mechanism.  I see some of my contemporaries who appear to be building more complexity into their life and it just baffles me.

That part about Christianity being pitched to captives certainly resonates with what I've studied regarding the early church and the Roman empire.  Christianity rapidly grew early on with those disenfranchised people largely because it promised a better life after this crappy one.

I mean we in the grandest sense, all of us, everyday, an overriding compulsion of our species.  All of us used to know how to make the things we needed start to finish.  A hand axe is ubiquitous.  Very few of us know, today, how even one of the simplest components of the things we need come together.  We were self sufficient but impoverished in a vast wilderness.  Now we're comparatively wealthy specialists in little domes of attention and concern.  Effectively closing the curtains on all of this wonder, all of this meaning, while lamenting our loss of connection to it.  Religious ideations appear to have started out as an explanation for that greater world, meaningfully and even truthfully informed by it (at least some of the time), a world to which we were very well adapted - but in urban populations - in this world- it ends up becoming a replacement by circumstance and necessity.  The religion of nature standing in for being in nature or a part of nature.  The religion of a better life beyond this life, the same. 

I think it's interesting that in so many versions of this story..the place we came from and the place we're going to is, for all intents and purposes, a garden.  Whatever we miss, we lost at the beginning, whatever we mean to have ......is where we're going.  We're domesticators.  It makes us happy, provides us with a purpose.  We discover meaning in all of it.  In our pets, our plants, our civilized and cultivated personalities, our penchant for euclidean geometry and manicured spaces.  Maybe this is meaning with a small m - but that's one huge small m.  It checks all the boxes..and yet...here we are - poisoning it, not living up to our potential as partners in life, with life.  Saddled with one life denying religion after another aggressively marketing itself to people who've engineered their own disaffection.

If a better life is good in the next life, it stands to reason that a better life in this life would also be as good for all of the same reasons.  If a connection to some greater thing is a crucial part of the human pysche then we can (and do) have it here...and alot of it, even within the confines of my one small pet m. You could honestly put late stage full on free market capitalism down as religion-alike. The promise of a better tomorrow excusing our dumping today.