Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

[Diablo]

Just get on and enjoy every day of your life.

[Cato]

Brooding over the inevitable is self inflicted torture. Immortal fantasy may provide some temporary solace, but is akin to believing in the existence and power of Oz while simultaneously accepting the existence and activity of the man behind the curtain.

[Esquilax]

Though a man whose melancholia about life's hardships and brevity arguably represents the mindset that has, throughout written history, plagued the greater part of our species.

True, though I don't find it at all useful to be mired in depression over an event that is completely beyond our control and inevitable. We must accept that it's there and move on. Whenever I read these theistic arguments for why it's so unfulfilling to be an atheist I don't ever really see a legitimate argument for why mortality should be this looming dread that sucks the color out of everything else, I just see a fiat assumption that it must be so based on the only difference between the atheist and the theist as people. It's not so much a presentation that demonstrates that we are unhappy as unbelievers, or an argument for why we should be unhappy, it's just a reflection of the writer's desire that we be less happy than him for having the temerity to disagree with him.

Just look at the quotes in the first post: none of them are arguments, they're just pretty words framed around an observation the writer expects should be true merely because in his personal opinion our position represents something distasteful.

Not that the next day will be exactly like today; that the next day will be. Period. I think it's superficial to regard the apparent nothingness that envelopes material existence for all but the brief moment we are given to experience as irrelevant to the here and now of that experience. For myself anyway, it creates a situation that is far more pessimistic, if not wholly absurd.

It's not so much that it's irrelevant, because I'm not really talking about mortality so much as I am about our reactions to it. Generally speaking I'm able to accept the inevitability of death, and treat my limited time as something of value, whereas so many theists see that same end result as something that mars the entire experience. It's something they think they've escaped from in their chosen belief systems, but merely convincing yourself that the same thing isn't going to happen to you... how is that a compelling argument for that being true?

There's something very unsettling about how well crafted William James' prose is, on this topic. He's turned so much time and energy to describing how hollow atheism must be, spent so much thought on our deaths that his determined foisting of fatalism onto us feels almost lovingly crafted, in a way. Like a perverse little fantasy, that we must be less happy than he, we simply have to have a worldview that leads us to depression because it's not exactly like his!

I dunno, it's just kinda gross to see another human being spend so much time attempting to make other people sad. And that's so much worse for how ineffective the effort turned out to be; it's all just tilting at windmills, but without any apparent conflict in place it's tilting at windmills in order to make the overall quality of life for his fellow human beings worse.

[Crossless2.0]

I don't accept that pessimism and joy can't coexist, and I have no patience for those who insist that I should think different just because they require an imaginative crutch to lend significance to their lives. Yes, I will die; so will everyone else. That brute fact does not diminish my pleasure in life. If anything, those pleasures I do enjoy are made keener by the knowledge that it will all end some day.

My lover and family bring me joy. Music and the other arts bring me joy. I feel joy when I learn more about the world I live in. I experience joy in nature regularly. None of it depends on my indulging in the vanity of the believer: I am so important that eternity must put a stamp on these experiences before any of it "matters". I consider people who think that way as spiritually stunted dwarves, and the only appropriate response is pity and contempt.

[Mudhammam]

I see what you mean, Esquilax. I haven't finished getting through James' work so I'm not sure whether or not he believes in God (he states his views at the end of the work, so I'm waiting to get there myself--if you know, don't tell!). I figured, at this point anyway, that he's either a) expressing a sentiment about naturalism that he's confronted in himself or others, or b) he's trying to convey that point of view as objectively as possible, and in which case, it's true that there is no objective meaning to be had.

Also, it's definitely not an argument for theism; if the object of our lives ought to be happiness, however, and theism can bring that to someone whereas other approaches/ideas cannot, then belief in God or what have you should be studied psychologically so that we might reap its benefits--I think that's where James is coming from. As for myself, I can say, sure, there is something tragic in life and death but accept that is the way things are, at least from my perspective, and not delude myself into thinking that is an argument for anything in particular, especially God!

[Tonus]

I think that your outlook on life is shaped by a lot of things, and religion might only have a minor effect on a lot of people. Some of the most glum and depressing people I've ever met happened to be devout Christians-- their belief that the next life was the one worth living made them treat their current life as something to endure instead of enjoy. I enjoy life as much now as I did when I was a believer, because I'm just that kind of person. I suppose that if I tried hard enough, I could become depressed about the future and my inevitable death, but there are simply too many cool and interesting and fun things to do in the meantime. So I'll just be busy doing those, while other people decide to waste what time they have by being depressed about what will happen when it runs out.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I would go further than James. Holding dear the prospect of future annihilation leads inexorably to existential nihilism. Ontological naturalism destroys all identity, semiotic meaning, and appeal to rationality. This leaves its adherents living a self-constructed fantasy contrary to what they actually believe true.

[Esquilax]

I would go further than James. Holding dear the prospect of future annihilation leads inexorably to existential nihilism. Ontological naturalism destroys all identity, semiotic meaning, and appeal to rationality. This leaves its adherents living a self-constructed fantasy contrary to what they actually believe true.

You have never once been able to demonstrate that.

Not that the appeal to consequences fallacy makes the position of naturalism any less true.

[Cato]

I would go further than James. Holding dear the prospect of future annihilation leads inexorably to existential nihilism. Ontological naturalism destroys all identity, semiotic meaning, and appeal to rationality. This leaves its adherents living a self-constructed fantasy contrary to what they actually believe true.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with existential nihilism unless one makes the mistake of equivocating it with nihilism or thinks that nihilism necessarily follows.

These forums are filled with examples that make your claims of ontological naturalism's destructive capability ridiculous.

Your last claim is absurd. You are claiming that reason informed by science results in fantasy. Yet, I assume you support religious claims that fly in the face of observation as non-fantasy.

[Mudhammam]

I would go further than James. Holding dear the prospect of future annihilation leads inexorably to existential nihilism. Ontological naturalism destroys all identity, semiotic meaning, and appeal to rationality. This leaves its adherents living a self-constructed fantasy contrary to what they actually believe true.

This deserves further qualification. As it stands, I can't possibly see how one can make such a generality with perhaps exception to the "appeal to rationality" bit, with the modifier "objective" added to it. That is to say, objective rationality does appear to be about as demonstrable under ontological naturalism as the existence of external objects are to the solipsist. By objective rationality I mean a pure reason that applies to objects as they actually are, rather than as they merely appear in our given conception of them. I don't see escape from an reductio ad absurdum unless we allow for something like Idealism or assume that reality is inextricably rational, though on the naturalistic view, this is, as far as I can tell, totally unaccounted for.

Apart from whether or not the nature of rational experience demands appeal to God, if as nothing less than a necessary ideal in our imagination, there does seem to me another rational basis for faith (I'm only testing these ideas so feel free to expose my errors if I had made one): for the person acutely aware of their infirmities derived from a disposition towards existential nihilism--the person that cannot live in harmony with the world because their environment is so laden with evil and tragedy--such an existence, to persist on, does seem tilted on the side of irrational; might then a belief or a hope in the eventual disclosure of the sublime, the divine, a more perfect state, however you frame it, be the most rational option available for them, other than suicide?