RE: Does atheism inspire people?
June 1, 2012 at 12:04 pm
(This post was last modified: June 1, 2012 at 12:33 pm by Mister Agenda.)
(May 31, 2012 at 3:27 pm)StatCrux Wrote:(May 31, 2012 at 3:02 pm)Annik Wrote: The idea that there is no heaven, no hell, no afterlife. I get one life and I'll be damned if I don't make it count.
This is an argument I hear often and makes no logical sense. What do you mean exactly by "make it count" count for what? If this is it, nothing after, then this life is meaningless and any attempt to imbue any meaning is purely delusional, while it may make you feel better its ultimately living a pointless lie. Belief in God and eternal life gives meaning and purpose with consequence to our actions and lives, its internally coherent. Saying life has no meaning then creating meaning is internally incoherent. Faith and doubt are two sides to the same coin, the types who worry me are those with certainty, those who claim they are certain there is no God.
Asserting life without an afterlife is meaningless is an assertion, you've neglected the part where you show how a finite life having meaning is illogical. It's like saying that a movie is meaningless because it has an ending. It's not enough to say that believing life has no inherent meaning but we can give it a subjective one is internally incoherent, you have to demonstrate how it is internally incoherent, otherwise it's just a baseless assertion. And if you're worried about people who claim to be certain there's no God, you don't have much to worry about because there's not very many of those.
(May 31, 2012 at 5:24 pm)StatCrux Wrote: What is a poe? And for the record it's not me that changes the subject, it's the numerous different people who go off on tangents. You're the one calling me a douchebag! Again, I say, I've never resorted to insults. It seems that it's perfectly acceptable for me to be insulted though...
A poe is someone who pretends to be a member of a religion, then says things to make that religion look bad. Poe's Law states that it is impossible to distinguish someone doing this from a true believer unless they admit it.
Do you really think all you have to do to avoid being insulting is to avoid calling people names? The gentility of your insults doesn't make them less insulting. Meaning is more important than word selection.
I took a few minutes to reflect on what would make our lives meaningless. I think the best way to make our lives meaningless is for them to be a mere prelude to an endless eternity, trillions of years upon trillions of years never ending; against which our mortal lives become more and more meaningless with every passing eon. Just a tiny distressed flicker before eternity.
What does make our lives meaningful? That our lives are the only thing at all that we have. Scarcity is what makes something valuable, abundance makes something cheap: like dirt. Even if our lives are only impotent flailing before the dark, that is far from meaningless.
