Atheists... Your life is pointless

What did they say about the liberty and justice for all bit?

It might be worth saying in respect of the "liberty and justice for all" bit that it was in 1772 that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield handed down a legal ruling that any slave who set a foot on English soil ceased to be a slave there and then.

I wonder how much that cost us.

Hard to say. But I can imagine that the demand for english soil skyrocketed. If not for the fact that the only ones who needed it was penniless slaves I imagine english soil would have been the number one export item.

The nature of soil is said to be an important determinant of national character. Even regional character.

I suppose it works by trace minerals in the soil coming from the rocks in the hills which come to rest in brains and other organs. Lots of people buy "Local Produce" for that very reason.

Devonshire Cream is supposed to cause big tits, sunny dispositions and cute dimples in maids. Aberdeen Angus beef creates grit and determination they say.

Pennsylvanian succulent lamb cutlets seem to have a strange effect from what I can tell. (That's a farmerman joke.)

You are what you eat?

I wonder how the Catholics are taking the growing chorus of accusations against the pope. He is being accused of covering up for pedophile priests. I guess these pedophiles were of little moment, and the church could keep them in positions in which they worked with kids.

What sounds SO damaging is a statement in the Times that the pope during his tenure as (arch?) bishop of Munich spent more time in pursuit of "theological dissidents" than sexual abusers.

If athiests are right then life IS pointless. If they are correct then everything they claim makes life worth living is really valueless. I personally think there's a very good chance the atheists are right. So this leaves us with the difficult dillemma of finding some reason to continue living. While I do not neccessarily condone suicide, it is neither better or worse than continuing with your life. If there is no higher purpose, then everything than optimistic atheists believe (humanism for example) is completely devoid of meaning. Optimistic atheists will tell you that life is worth living for the things that we personally hold valuable, for example love or happiness. But if you are an atheist the. You must admit that love and happiness don't really mean anything. They are just mixtures of neurotransmitters diffusing across synaptic clefts. They are molecules, no more or less valuable than anything else.

Those who say who cares are deluding themselves. To be completely honest with yourself (which I believe is an important motivation for affirming atheism in the first place) then you must realize that life really is stupid. It is a cycle of suffering and adversity for most, punctuated by breif periods of happiness, or at least relief. If this is the honest truth then humanism be damned, why should we care about the value of human life if the reality of it is that life is totally worthless. The earth, a relatively small ball of rock, is just a piece of cosmic debris that happens to have organic entities with metabolisms. From the atheists standpoint, you MUST admit that there is nothing special about life because there is nothin special at all. The concept "special" is a human construction, but if humans are just a self-sustaining chemical reaction, then why should our illusory feelings even matter?

I believe that the goal should be a search for the truth, and we cannot reject the truth or sugarcoat it just because it's depressing. I have no comfort and no joy, I am acutely aware that in a short time, my consciousness will cease just as everyone's will. At that inevitable point, does it even matter if I lived in the first place? Life is transient and without meaning.

The difficult question is what now? Why continue living? This is a quesion that I have personally struggled with for decades, and the simple answer is that there really is no reason to continue living. This doesn't mean suicide is the best course of action because there is no best course of action. There is really nothing to do. I sometimes think that since I'm going to die soon enough, why not expedite the process?

The only thing that prevents this is not the "fear of god", but the tiny grain of uncertainty. While I roundly reject all theistic beliefs thus far, science is completely unable to solve what Dr. David Chalmers calls the "hard problem of consciousness", namely how electrochemical reactions in the brain can translate to phenomenal experience (ie color experience like "redness"). There IS no satisfactory physicalist theory that can explain consciousness (and it seems likely that none ever will) and for this one reason I have hope. It's not much of a hope, but uncertainty about cosmology is better than a the nihilistic reality that we face if the atheists are indeed right.

Many points well taken, but I would recommend (only recommend) that you consider Buddhism, a "religious" practice (especially the zen sort), that permits one to relate positively to the ultimate meaninglessness of Reality while remaining atheistic in the sense of not depending on a self-demeaning patermythology.

At least you'll be liberated from the sense that meaninglessness (viz., there is no Plan) and pointlessness (viz., there is no cosmic goal) are problems. Indeed, they are aspects of Nirvana.

Being dead prevents you from posting such posts that consider values of being dead, no?

That is what I remember him for. (I spent the last tentative years as a catholic arguing with him in my mind.)

Yep--you're dead right YD. Why not off yourself? You can do it painlessly and, as de Sade said, who knows what you risk if you don't.

Which is a powerful argument. Burning to death in a car crash is no joke compared to a few pills and a bottle of rum.

But what about having progeny to face the same dilemma every atheist faces? That's not only incomprehensible but unforgiveable.

So the Christian, by providing a reason for living, serves evolution's purpose of keeping the species going which the atheist can only do by passing on the dilemma and passing it off with a flippant remark. The rest of creation, having no self consciousness, does not face the dilemma, to be or not to be, and simply eats, drinks and copulates. And copulates without any restrictions other than losing a fight, without birth control, without abortion and without homosexuality which are all causes atheists promote.

Atheism is contra-evolution and I am pleased you have shoved the real argument up their ass. I never had the nerve to be so blunt about it.

They drop their own kids in that sort of **** just for a moment's glory. And then they tell them what **** it is by their preaching. It's incredible.

So, you need an invisible, superior force that is exterior to yourself to give your life a point? I would say that is the definition of pointlessness!

So whats this reason so boldly proclaimed by you on behalf of christianity?

We're not here to preach points and score souls, we have the ability to choose how we live, not why we live. The 'why' is as ineffable as always, and if some people find the ineffable intolerable, then that's more of a reflection of themselves than the result of a religious shortfall.

So, wipe the foam from your mouth and try to think, it's hard i know, but I believe in you!

Bingo, Plainoldyou. When we were thrown into this world without any cosmic plan or God, we were blessed with the situation of freedom. The world is to be of our own making--even if we insist that it's God creation. Theism diminishes Man, supernaturalism diminishes the natural world and the idea of an afterlife diminishes the value of this real life. I want a naturalistic, humanistic and this-worldly religiousity.
It just happens that that is what the zen version of Buddhism is about.

Yeah you site a common fallacy. Survival of the fittest doesn't imply that I would be better off if i killed everyone else around me. Humans are social animals and we rely heavily on others for survival both physically and emotionally. So to actually kill everyone off around me i would be putting my own survival at risk. Think about all the people it takes to live the life style that i do today. I would say roughly about ten thousand people allow me to live the way in which i do. Kill these people off and ill have to do everything myself and i really don't want to do that.

Secondly, i also have empathy for others, but perhaps you can't comprehend what empathy is. i acknowledge that others don't want to be killed so i don't kill them because i wouldn't want to be killed either. i want to get along with others so they get along with me. it is mutual respect and i don't need to fear some invisible friend to play nicely with others. i don't need the fear of hell to be nice to other people. i can sympathize not only with other people but even with animals.

So why don't you use reason instead of this tired old apologetic nonsense argument?

Wrong, there is compelling evidence that evolutionary changes come from individuals but that a species evolves in direct proportion to how well the individuals cooperate with one another. You might not call that love, but I do.



Of course you do, because you, like most people who say they believe in god but don't need him (it's almost always a him) also think spiritual is religious.

I feel that Krumple would be a good neighbor.

Try watching a football game with Krumpie.