the meaning of life
Feb. 13th, 2008 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eMet a nice old guy yesterday on the bus who started chatting to Margaret and me. He had decided to destroy a lot of his paintings that he'd made for his wife in retribution of the affair she was having with a younger man. Apparently his wife was a deeply religious woman so he couldn't understand what had gone wrong. He thought she needed to go to church more.
I gently pointed out that religion may be the problem, not the solution, and that everywhere in the world that religion is strongest, you'll find that violence, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, etc, are also strongest.
He acknowledged that much of the world's violence is religiously inspired, but asked, "If there is no god then what point is there?" I was trying to formulate a proper answer to this when I lost my opportunity as the conversation moved on.
It amazes me how many times I've heard religious people ask this question. They ignore the obvious answer, that life is for living. What else could it be for?
The weird thing is that although religion purports to give a meaning, when you lift the curtain of paradox and obfuscation you find nothing there. They will say that god has a purpose for us, but when you ask what that purpose is, after a few misleads and conjectures you generally find them happily stating that we can't know what god's purpose is. I don't understand how religious people are not unsettled by how lacking it is to say that if there is a god he has a purpose for us but we can't know what it is. What they are saying is that someone tells us that some unknowable being exists who has an unknowable purpose for us so that makes it all okay. That isn't a purpose. It is an absolute lack of reason dressed up to look like something meaningful might be lurking behind.
It seems to me that when you look at life with a clear eye you see that life itself has one major purpose: to perpetuate life. But we are subset of life that is intelligent, which has given us a second goal: to learn. Being part of a social species brings a third purpose: to care for one another.
Simple logic gives us the most noble triplet of reasons to exist:
I gently pointed out that religion may be the problem, not the solution, and that everywhere in the world that religion is strongest, you'll find that violence, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, etc, are also strongest.
He acknowledged that much of the world's violence is religiously inspired, but asked, "If there is no god then what point is there?" I was trying to formulate a proper answer to this when I lost my opportunity as the conversation moved on.
It amazes me how many times I've heard religious people ask this question. They ignore the obvious answer, that life is for living. What else could it be for?
The weird thing is that although religion purports to give a meaning, when you lift the curtain of paradox and obfuscation you find nothing there. They will say that god has a purpose for us, but when you ask what that purpose is, after a few misleads and conjectures you generally find them happily stating that we can't know what god's purpose is. I don't understand how religious people are not unsettled by how lacking it is to say that if there is a god he has a purpose for us but we can't know what it is. What they are saying is that someone tells us that some unknowable being exists who has an unknowable purpose for us so that makes it all okay. That isn't a purpose. It is an absolute lack of reason dressed up to look like something meaningful might be lurking behind.
It seems to me that when you look at life with a clear eye you see that life itself has one major purpose: to perpetuate life. But we are subset of life that is intelligent, which has given us a second goal: to learn. Being part of a social species brings a third purpose: to care for one another.
Simple logic gives us the most noble triplet of reasons to exist:
- to be life-enhancing
- to learn about ourselves and the world around us
- to care for each other
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-16 08:12 pm (UTC)- Care for each other (aka love thy neighbor etc)
- learn about outselves and the world around us (seek wisdom thru the Holy Spirit)
- be life-enhancing (procreate, go yee forth and multiply)
;-)
ps - i sent u a separate email. if u didn't get it, lemme know here and i'll repeat. dunno if I have the right email addy
no subject
Date: 2008-02-17 05:53 am (UTC)The trouble is that other people look at exactly the same religious teachings as you do and quite honestly come away with an entirely different set of morals. It is not that those people are inherently bad. Their received morals are quite honest as far as religion is concerned. Unfortunately religion is just as concerned with killing and hurting other people as it is with getting along with people. Just as one person can point to a text in the bible exhorting people to be tolerant and nice to one another, another can point to other texts instilling intolerance and hatred. Sadly, it simply isn't a reliable guide to modern morality. It wasn't even a reliable guide to Bronze Age morality.
And that's just in the bible, which has given rise to hundreds of forms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations
But it gets much worse when you consider the around 1,000 major religions that mankind is buffetted by.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions
Even Jesus, one of the nicest guys in religion, considered slavery to be natural and proper. We know now that it is utterly immoral for one person to enslave another.
The simple fact that atheists and agnostics can be good people shows that religion is not needed for that. Morality is independent of religion.
I got your email Sandra. Yippee! Thanks for the thought. I'm grateful and rapt.