(November 28, 2023 at 11:31 am)Confused-by-christianity Wrote:(November 28, 2023 at 11:14 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: ... It's an extrinsic value related to the belief or existence of gods, instead....
Im going to go with that one. heres a stream of consciousness guess ......
Im going to give this impossible question a go ...
I'll put my athiest hat on ...
Material universe only ...
Here, i cannot see how anything is important.
All i see is matter moving about with other matter.
Importance, value and meaning seem to just all be in my brain - but they dont really really matter - not more than my sayso. And who should care about that??
The only way i can make something important is to assign value to a thing.
But i cannot see why anything should be valueable outside my own experience and sayso. And i cant see why my own experience and sayso should matter.
Thinking something matters, or is valueable or is important - is all in my head and carries no more weight than that.
Others might find a consensus that a thing is important - but a cluster of material thinking a thing matters doesn't mean anything either.
Why should i care more about a mouse than a lamp.
???
Religious hat
Material universe and spiritual universe ...
You can have a concept of moving more towards reality or further from reality.
You can say the material universe is less real than the spiritual.
You can say the material universe is subject to the higher reality of the spiritual.
So there really is a spiritual thing called: Love, goodness, beauty, truth, mind, freewill .... and so on.
In that universe you would see these items as you "see" gravity operating.
If you open to the idea of god - you can say there is a higher reality - more "real" i.e. closer to god. Spiritual realities project out of god - attributes. god is projecting parts of himself unpersonalised.
the end
you need a higher reality to bolt the material one onto. Ive basically described a larger spiritual universe that contains the material one, that instead of physical forces, has spiritual realities. with the spiritual realities - life in the physical universe can have meaning moreso than our sayso.
thats a rolling attempt. the obvious thing to say is - ok, what then.
We can make this material universe meaningful by saying there really is a spiritual universe with spiritual realities - which the material is subject to. spiritual realities are not sustained in their own right - they are projections of god.
?????????????
Im going to stop there ... thats a guess at how to make it work??
@SimpleCaveman Is this theology??
It is curious to see how the "atheist hat" tends to downplay the importance of society.
Granted, you did include the "Others might find a consensus" bit, so kudos to you, but then failed to roll it to its natural conclusion. You just wished to have some overarching, objective, independent-from-humanity importance that everyone should attach to things... everyone, even if non-human.
But one can say that there is objective importance when that is the societal consensus - objective to that society, subjective to each individual within that society.
I think a good example of this is the important rule that states that it is wrong to kill another human being. It's in the 10 commandments, it's in pretty much every codified law of the land. Human societies agree that it is important to let other humans live. Obviously, it keeps the society alive.
Still, some will interpret the rule to mean that you should only not kill within your own society - but it's fine to kill humans from other societies (or else there would have been no holy wars in the last two millenia, right?)
With the awareness of the global village, some of us humans have come to extend the importance of this rule to the whole of humanity thus making it feel even more objective. To the religious mind, that makes it more divine... to me, it just seems like the right thing to do... To the United Nations, it's a human right. But the obvious existence of war makes it clear that not all humans in power agree.