A purpose is a property of actions. A meaning is a property of words. It make no sense to speak of a meaning of a purpose.
I don’t know what you mean by “It will make no difference”. Every action makes a difference in something.
To say that nothing matters is to make a moral judgment, and is thus self-contradictory.
Justify to who? Not to me and I’m the only one who desides what is just.
See above.
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Ditto.
Prove to who? valid to who? If it’s valid to me it’s valid.
Once again, I decide all by myself what is just and not just. It is not just for you to kill me because I say so. My say-so settles everything in my universe.
We’re going in circles. The difference between me and everybody else is that it’s MY UNIVERSE, not theirs. The purpose of life is to make the universe pleasant for ME. Anyone who thwarts that purpose is wrong by definition because I say so and I am the final authority.
The funny thing about this is that everybody else feels exactly the same way. Even the decision to submit to a perceived moral authority is rooted in a completely subjective personal decision that submitting to that authoruty is the “right” thing to do. It’s not as though there’s any way to determine what is objectively “moral” anyway so all anyone has is subjective morality. If you think otherwise, you’re kidding yourself.
In math at least, it is possible for an infinite amount of “something wortheless” to be “worth something”.
I’m interested by your concepts, and I would like to suscribe to your newsletter…
An important point, I think. Assuming an eternal afterlife that would be absolute bliss, I’ve a hard time finding something that would differentiate it from stasis. Or from half a second of absolute bliss.
I would disagree with that. I would tend to support the buddhist view : everything we do, even the smallest moves, has consequences on both the large scale and the long term.
Well, in all probability it won’t make much difference to us. But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it could make a difference to my kids and to future generations.
And yes, I’ll be in a cold dark grave at the time. So?
I don’t believe you. People’s lives are filled with purpose and points. We can’t HELP it.
Explain. How is N times 0 ever anything but 0?
Big round of applause for our token nihilist everybody! He believes in NOOOOSHING!!!
(Remember: Do not tip the nihilists! They hate it.)
Seriously though, is there any point to your exercise here? Do you believe that life is only meaningful if there is an afterlife? Are you attacking some particular short-sighted comment made by one of the posters in particular? It seems like you are playing devils advocate here, but not obvious as to what view or purpose your sarcasm is directed towards.
“End and Goal. Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet, as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also has not reached its goal. A parable.”
Nietzche
The purpose of life? To sing a little song, do a little dance, make a little love.
I struggled with the same question as the OP for a long time. And then realized that the question itself is part of the purpose of life - to decide for oneself what that purpose is. And then aim for it.
Life does not have any grand purpose or design, it merely is. And that is good enough for me. Yet even if life lacks meaning in the beginning, it does not mean it cannot be instilled with meaning.
I agree, and following Buddha, what is the mind that creates the meaning…I decide the purpose of my life, which is partly determining the answers to ‘I’, ‘purpose’, ‘life’, and ‘nature’.
As far as any afterlife, I will deal with that when I get there. It has no bearing on my current existence. This life has plenty to offer on its own.
AP
Okay, now that my thinking is a little less impaired, I will try to explain myself a little better. Just saying that made my brain function go down a little, so we’ll see how we go.
An afterlife in itself does not give life any more purpose, but I assume that an afterlife implies the existence of a God of some description who has created us to have a purpose. And also if the human race would be around forever then it might actually be worth something to improve it. And let’s say you are working for a company, and then you go work somewhere else and you say you are satisfied that you have done your part for the company. But the only reason you can be satisfied is you can remember working there and feel a sense of purpose, since purpose is a part of you. But after you die there is no more you and therefore no more purpose. Which means there was never a purpose in the first place. And Voyager I have not been reading existentialists before bed but I am wearing a Kafka t-shirt. I still don’t understand why some people treat the death of the human race as something different from their own death because it seems to me it is just as inevitable and can be thought of as simply the death of the last human as opposed to them, the 24 352 308 134th human or something. And since everything an atheist does is ultimately for another person it would no seem very productive.
Well, that’s a pretty big addendum: why not just say that and leave the afterlife out of it in the first place?
The problem being that if God created people with a purpose, then so what? Being created by somebody for a purpose just means that THEY have an intention for you. That doesn’t mean that YOU find it meaningful or find purpose in that. Purpose is still something you have to find in what you are doing.
As with most things, bringing God into the equation, despite initial appearances, adds precisely nothing, gets us nowhere towards answering our questions. How does the existence of God demonstrate that a finite, or even an infinite, life, is inherently meaningful? God is a dude that is eternal, but why does that make his purposes or desires particuarly important or moral? Does power do that, in your view? Why? I don’t see how any of that helps resolve the quest for knowledge.
This makes no sense to me. Why doesn’t it make sense to improve the human condition regardless of whether we all will continue to experience existence forever? I mean, forgive me for saying this, but if you and what I’m trying to read might be Shodan’s position is correct, that really IS the ultimate sort of nihilism. If you guys don’t see the value in improving peoples lives for its own sake, instead of because of some sort of metaphysical payoff of eternity, or at least the promise that you’re actions will persist forever, then I really can’t see that you sincerely value anything in any way that I can understand.
In fact, to turn this around, if there is an afterlife in which we’ll continue forever, THEN it hardly seems worth the effort to improve everything, especially since supposedly everything will all just be made/screened out to be perfect anyway?
What? Why is there no purpose in the first place? The fact that there is no Martin Luther King now doesn’t mean that there never was a Martin Luther King. The dude lived. Now he’s dead. But while he was here, and after he made a huge difference in people’s lives. Is that worth nothing to you just because he and all the people he affected will some day die?
What the heck DO you value then? What sort of bizarre value doesn’t find meaning and value in what people do, regardless of whether it’s recorded in some sort of eternal Guiness Book of Universe Records?
Dude. People are alive. NOW. Doing things affect their lives. That MEANS something to them. It doesn’t matter that they will someday die, that you will die, that no one will remember. If none of that matters, would that mean you wouldn’t mind being tortured in a cell for ten years since it doesn’t matter in the end? Does that make ANY sense?
To take your company analogy further - Sure, if I don’t remember working there, the good work I’ve done there would mean nothing to me afterwards. But while I’m there, it would be very important to me indeed. I’d be proud of my work, happy to receive compliments from my colleagues, and happy to know that I’m improving the lives of all of them it at least some small way.
The thing is, if this life is all we have, that’s exactly why it’s meaningful. This little block of space-time, 80-odd years across (hopefully) is the whole universe from my point of view, and I want to make it as nice a universe as possible. I can imply that other people want to have nice universes too, and do my little bit to help them achieve that.
As you say, eventually there won’t be any people left so nothing will matter because there won’t be anyone for it matter to. I say, so what? Between now and then, there’s going to be countless people to whom the quality of life will matter. I know it matters to me, and I know I’m grateful to all the people in the past who made that possible, even if they’re completely forgotten in the grand scheme of things. Why not try my best to let that continue in the future?
Payoff? Nope. I don’t want any payoff. But the sense of having achieved something is a fallacy because if humans won’t be around forever, then everything you did for humans amounts to exactly nothing.
That includes MLK, by the way. What he did for people will be irrelevant after there are no more people.
Not from the point of view of each of us whilst we still exist. And isn’t that the only point of view that really matters?
No.
To put it another way:
Yes, you’re right, but shouldn’t we just make the best of it anyway?
I know that’s looking at things through ‘human goggles’, but what’s so bad about that? I like these goggles. They really suit my eyes.
So will your kids and future generations. And nothing you do will then affect them in any way. Therefore nothing you do will make any difference. To anyone.
Nonsense. I kill you, and you no longer say anything. Therefore, even by your subjective standard, it is not immoral to kill you. It wasn’t immoral for Hitler to kill the Jews, because dead people don’t object.
Unless you can come up with some rational basis for your subjective judgement, you haven’t succeeded in saying anything.
What sarcasm? I am looking for logical consistency, or the admission that it doesn’t exist and that arguments about atheist morality are meaningless noises.
Saying “we create our own meaing” is exactly the same as saying “there is no meaning”. Unless you can come up with some consistent, rational standard, then you can “create your own meaning” based on anything - altruism, racism, the Red Sox - anything - and it is exactly as valid as anything else.
Therefore, it is meaningless for atheists to say “the invasion of Iraq was immoral”, or “the government should provide universal health care”, or “it was wrong to gas the Kurds”, or “the Holocaust was not nice”. All these are begging the question. Unless you can establish some standard for morality which is better than nothing, every statement about morality is a string of noises meaning exactly nothing.
Regards,
Shodan