(February 8, 2015 at 8:53 am)Nell Wrote: You built a sandcastle? What's the point? It's going to be gone when the tide comes in. You finished reading some novel? Well wasn't that a fine waste of an hour.Did you enjoy it? Did you get something out of it? Relaxation... learning something new... figuring out a new direction to take... etc?
When you've been taught that the meaning in your life was determined and given to you by someone else, and he cannot be denied, it's easy to feel lost when you find out that the 'someone else' isn't real. But the sense of meaning and purpose you felt during that period of your life was real. The happiness or apprehension or ambition or motivation you felt were real. So if you could feel these things when there was no god, can you feel them now that you realize that there is no god? Sure.
God is the face you see in the mirror. Ask that god for meaning and purpose. Why focus on the time that comes after you are gone? You can't get anything done at that point. If the only meaning and purpose you find in life will end for you when you die, isn't that all the more reason to enjoy it and appreciate it while you live? And isn't that reason enough to strive for greater things? The feeling of happiness and freedom I felt when finally shrugging off the shackles of religion was at least in part because now I could assign my own meaning and purpose in life, instead of waiting for god to show up and point out my spot on the eternal assembly line.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould