RE: Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?
October 28, 2021 at 8:20 am
(This post was last modified: October 28, 2021 at 8:21 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 27, 2021 at 9:29 pm)Spongebob Wrote: There appears to be at least two different conversations going on this thread. One posits that there can be no meaning without resurrection. Why? How does resurrection give meaning to our lives on earth?
In the other, @The Grand Nudger seems to acknowledge that theists have some idea in mind when they talk about meaning. I tend to agree that they do but I don't really hear them expressing it so well. Is this a failing of communication or an inability of them to understand their own idea? It seems that if you can't come to a solid understanding of what an idea is and communicate it, then I can't agree there's much to communicate in the first place. I think theists want there to be meaning that's god-driven, but because there's no satisfactory answer to that, they try their best to manufacture one and it falls on its face.
I'll be repeating something from another thread here because I think it's relevant to deconstructing meaning in that context. They're bargaining for justice, bargaining for redemption, bargaining for mercy, bargaining for their very lives.
A person might believe that justice (or whatever else they believe is posited by resurrection and all that it entails) is value making or meaning giving. That injustice would be value or meaning depriving or destroying. That a vast number of personal and intimately consequential beings stand in demonstrable relation to each other and a description of that immense relationship is a description of justice, of which a person may want to be a part. Justice, which is itself one part of an even larger web of consequential relationships - all of it informing our sense of the numinous.
I tend to agree that justice is value/meaning making, injustice value/meaning destroying. If we read " a world without the resurrection" as "a world without justice" we can see why a person might then contend that a world without the resurrection had no meaning, or would be diminished in that respect. We could repeat this for a number of other thematically christian justifications for the statement.
-I just think they got the officiating agent in the transaction entirely wrong.
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