Atheism and Purpose

[Edward the Theist]

No. But I'll give you my atheist experience.

When I was around twelve, I started to question my beliefs in God. I believed in God because that's what my parents taught me. But I was curious about it, and I read the Bible cover to cover, and by the end of the book I was an atheist. I started to realize that there is no evidence for God. If there is, could you show me some? Because I can't find any. (And, of course, religious texts do not count as evidence because they were not written by God. They were written by man). And out of the many, many theories and possibilities about how the Earth, and the universe for that matter, came into existence, why is God the correct one? And how do you know you aren't believing in the wrong God? Which one is right?

And tada... I'm an atheist now.

You ask how do I know I'm not believing in the wrong god? How could I be? It's my God.

Everyone has their own god, even atheists have their own god, they simply don't differentiate between the thing they see in the mirror and God. Other people externalize god, like me. Some people have similar notions of god and build churches in response to that, but even in those churches, everyone forms their own image of god.

I suppose what I'm arguing is that there's something greater than gods.

As for my God, one thing I can say is that I've seen a lot of miracles in my life and I've received a lot of protection I didn't deserve, and I've been given a lot of understanding I couldn't have gotten on my own. So, I'm kind of stuck on my God.

Is my God make-believe? No, He's real. The same thing that created me created Him by creating me. It's that thing that baffles me. It's what I'm trying to illustrate philosophically and mathematically these days. I don't know if I'll succeed.

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Why would you want to complicate things with philisophical and existential nonsense? Just live your life, it's all that is expected. I don't really contemplate the end of my life, because for the time being it isn't really all that important. I'm alive today. I exist today. What could possibly be the purpose to that beyond what purpose I give myself, what goals I set for myself?

The thundering flaw in all of theism is that it revolves around the importance of an individual. You believe in spacegods and destiny because it makes you important. Your life has meaning because some all powerful celestial being deemed your life necessary for this planet. You believe in heaven and hell because your life cannot possibly end with the end of you. It's arrogance, pure and simple masturbation of the ego to follow some fanciful notion that in an infinite universe you have some divine purpose for existing.

You and I, along with every other creature are merely insignificant specks in a larger insignificant speck in an even larger insignificant and ordinary speck amidst hundreds of billions. Do you honestly look up at the stars at night and ponder what your purpose in the face of infinity is? How do you not feel small? You and I will die, and long after you and I die our fellow species will hopefully move on to other planets and other solar systems and maybe even someday other galaxies. We will be forgotten, we will have been but a twinkle in the existence of our fair species if it survives.

But what your "purpose" should be, as should everyone else's is to make what little time you spend on this rock worth your time. Do something with your life beyond spouting incoherent rhetoric on a message board and live as if you will die tomorrow. Because you most certainly will, perhaps not the day after today. But someday you will. And you will be nothing but a picture in the minds and whisper on the lips of everyone that you leave behind. Unless you do something extraordinary or become someone extraordinary you will dwell amongst the rest of us as mere ordinary mortals. So wake up every morning happy, go to bed every night content, and never stop moving yourself forward. Because once you move past all of the dogma and theological nonsense your life will either have been completed by the steps you have taken, or it will have been an uneventful intermission to the time before you were born and the time after you are gone. You are guaranteed a very short stay on this tiny rock floating in a void. What you do with it is yours to choose, how you live your short life is yours to choose. But don't follow the lives of so many who came before us and live your life expecting some reward at the end of it, some glimpse at immortality after your time here has ended. I can tell you it is almost certain that you will be sorely disappointed.

That's a very eloquent post. Thank you for writing it on my behalf. It sounds like the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. But if you're right, happiness is impossible because life and consciousness and the formation of a person who could write what you just did is a waste. We become aware, we go extinct. Actually, only a god could be that cruel to us.

But I do believe we cease to exist when we die. The difference, I would argue, is that we cease to exist the same way we ceased to exist as a small child.

For instance, I had a memory yesterday of something I said to my mother when I was five. I remembered it clearly for some reason, and it struck me that the person who said that to my mother was not the same person remembering it. The boy had ceased to exist a long time ago.

As for purpose, I would concede that it may not be possible to willfully follow a purpose in life. We have a purpose, each and everyone of us, but it comes to us automatically and deterministically. Some people are born for the prison yard, some people cure polio.

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But hey, at least you didn't claim that atheists don't believe in God because they want to sin. That would be both wrong and incredibly stupid. Especially since atheists don't bother with any concept of sin, and despite that, (if the statistics of America's prisons are any indication) they're probably better behaved than Christians anyway.

Oh let's be honest here for a minute. A lot of people are atheists because they don't like the moral restrictions placed on them by the Church, especially in regards to abortion and homosexuality. But having said that, a lot of people are atheists because the moral hypocrisy of the church is simply too disgusting for them to endure, especially if they've been a victim of it.

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One thread you could start is an explanation about your views on Cosmology.

Interesting you should say that: your avatar is a little topology graphic, and I'm convinced that the mathematical key to my theory of cosmology rests in a kind of relative topology. But I'm a way's off on that, unfortunately.