# God and Life **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 26, 2018, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192 "2018-04-26T22:27:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 30
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/581 "2018-05-19T16:50:45Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Good _LIFE_, you people. If you don’t want to play with this guy, _ **don’t play** _. Nobody’s forcing you to so much as open this thread! _Life!_ > > I’ll actually answer this seriously, by directing your attention to the word “drive”. > > From [etymonline.com](https://www.etymonline.com/word/drive) we learn that the word originated as a verb in Old English: “drifan”, which means to push or move something forward. This evolved into a noun - ‘cattle drive’, as a way to describe or mention a specific act of driving something. > > When people invented automobiles, the big huge difference they had from the carriages that preceded them is that they moved themselves. (It’s right there in the name - auto-mobile = self move.) They pushed themselves forward, and thus were self-driving; the part that pushes them forward is the drive train - there’s a lot of driving going on. So it’s unsurprising that when you go get in your horseless carriage and direct it to push itself and you along in particular directions, you are “driving the car” and “going for a drive”. > > The “pushing things” aspect of the word also became the standard way of describing an other specific kind of push - of golf and baseballs. A “driver” in golf is the hitting-things-stick that you use to make the ball really _move_, as opposed to just giving them a little shove (Scottish: put). And of course a line drive is when you use that other hitting-things-stick to push that ball really hard so that it moves in nearly a straight _line_. > > Having come to be associated with the kind of pushing motors do due to cars, the term eventually adopted another meaning as well. Drive motors have been used for various things, but one specific usage they’ve had was to push certain ferromagnetic disks around really _really_ fast, so that all the parts of them could be under a read/write head at basically the same time despite them being two feet across. There are a lot of ways these things could have ended up being named, but those motors were loud enough that you were _never_ going to forget they were there, so the devices were named after their motors. The ones with rigid platters got called “hard drives”. The ones with floppy platters (look around in a museum for them) were called “floppy drives”. The collective class of them? Drives. > And so a word got a bunch of different meaning, both noun and verb, all deriving from the same _general_ meaning but getting warped and mutated and changed along the way. That’s how languages work; that’s how they come to exist! (Except for French and certain other manufactured languages, anyway.) Does this mean that you can ride your computer’s persistent storage around town, or do better at golf if you try to hit the ball with your car? Yes! It absolutely does! No, wait, that’s a total lie. That would be a really dumb way to conflate the various meanings of the word. > Before you ask, the reason I didn’t just trace the etymology of the word ‘life’ itself is because even back in Old English the world already had a ton of meanings - the same ones it has today. The word is just too old to be able to closely examine the fun ways its meaning has changed - about the only modern examples are when it’s gets the ‘new meaning’ of being the trademark label for things. For example there’s this one board game, what one was it… So what are you driving at? ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/582 "2018-05-19T16:52:25Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > So what are you driving at? Ha Ha funny joke. (Where’s the ‘completely neutral flat-line mouth’ smiley?) ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/583 "2018-05-19T18:22:53Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Ha Ha funny joke. > > (Where’s the ‘completely neutral flat-line mouth’ smiley?) You always find the emoji you’re looking for in the last place you look. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/584 "2018-05-19T19:05:04Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Before you ask, the reason I didn’t just trace the etymology of the word ‘life’ itself is because even back in Old English the world already had a ton of meanings - the same ones it has today. The word is just too old to be able to closely examine the fun ways its meaning has changed - about the only modern examples are when it’s gets the ‘new meaning’ of being the trademark label for things. For example there’s this one board game, what one was it… I enjoyed your mini-dissertation on the word “drive.” There are certainly many colorations of meaning that a simple word like that can have. I think what you’re saying reinforces what I’m saying about a word like “life” having a multitude of meanings and many times misunderstandings arising from two people using two different interpretations of the same word. I cannot say which meaning is right. I can only say the meaning I associate with the word in a particular context. The point of the memes I posted is to show the more common use of the word life, which seems synonymous to me with “experience” or “circumstance.” “F\*\*\* My Life” as an everyday expression would not seem to mean “kill me now” so much as “what an unfortunate experience I had.” “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want” would seem to suggest “I’ll make my own choices regarding my life experience, thank you very much.” “When life hands you lemons” is clearly a personification of an abstract concept, and suggests that an entity like God or Mother Nature sometimes puts you in circumstances that are not in your favour, so do the best you can with it, "make lemonade. " I believe the personification of life is one of those interpretations of the word that is in keeping with personifications of other abstract concepts like god or Mother Nature. None of these terms are meant to be nailed down precisely (not even at Golgotha) because they are meant to appeal to our sense of poetry and metaphor. In fact, I would suggest that all religion is really meant to appeal to our sense of metaphor—it’s not meant to be taken literally (just like blessed are the cheesemakers—it refers to all manufacturers of dairy products). Taking things literally, which many posters in this thread have also done, creates as many problems for atheists as it does theists. Replacing the word God with the word Life (or vice-versa) obviously leads to some pretty ridiculous statements at times, while in other contexts, makes sense in a rather profound way. Do you believe in life? I certainly have no reason not to. Does life believe in me? Does it matter? Only if I’m trying to remake life in my own image and ascribe to it all of the faults that I ascribe to humans. It is precisely because we tend not to anthropomorphize life too often that we can see it as a nonpartisan objective state in the universe—the same state that might not work so well for religious thinkers if they think of themselves as god’s favorites. Life has no favorites. I don’t think. I could be wrong. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/585 "2018-05-19T19:54:25Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > I enjoyed your mini-dissertation on the word “drive.” There are certainly many colorations of meaning that a simple word like that can have. I think what you’re saying reinforces what I’m saying about a word like “life” having a multitude of meanings and many times misunderstandings arising from two people using two different interpretations of the same word. Everyone agrees that words can (and often do) have multiple meanings. The reason you’re pissing so many people off is they believe that you’re attempting to play a shell game with the meanings in an attempt to…well, okay, I’m not sure what motives they’re ascribing you. Premeditated murder of the language? Being a woo with malicious intent? Something else because lists always have three examples? I dunno. But in any case they think you’re messing with them and/or yourself with deliberate semantic games, and it’s not doing much for your popularity. > [@Biffster](#): > > I cannot say which meaning is right. I can only say the meaning I associate with the word in a particular context. The point of the memes I posted is to show the more common use of the word life, which seems synonymous to me with “experience” or “circumstance.” “F\*\*\* My Life” as an everyday expression would not seem to mean “kill me now” so much as “what an unfortunate experience I had.” “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want” would seem to suggest “I’ll make my own choices regarding my life experience, thank you very much.” “When life hands you lemons” is clearly a personification of an abstract concept, and suggests that an entity like God or Mother Nature sometimes puts you in circumstances that are not in your favour, so do the best you can with it, "make lemonade. " > > I believe the personification of life is one of those interpretations of the word that is in keeping with personifications of other abstract concepts like god or Mother Nature. None of these terms are meant to be nailed down precisely (not even at Golgotha) because they are meant to appeal to our sense of poetry and metaphor. In fact, I would suggest that all religion is really meant to appeal to our sense of metaphor—it’s not meant to be taken literally (just like blessed are the cheesemakers—it refers to all manufacturers of dairy products). > > Taking things literally, which many posters in this thread have also done, creates as many problems for atheists as it does theists. Replacing the word God with the word Life (or vice-versa) obviously leads to some pretty ridiculous statements at times, while in other contexts, makes sense in a rather profound way. Do you believe in life? I certainly have no reason not to. Does life believe in me? Does it matter? Only if I’m trying to remake life in my own image and ascribe to it all of the faults that I ascribe to humans. It is precisely because we tend not to anthropomorphize life too often that we can see it as a nonpartisan objective state in the universe—the same state that might not work so well for religious thinkers if they think of themselves as god’s favorites. Life has no favorites. I don’t think. I could be wrong. I dunno about life, but traffic lights _certainly_ hate me. As anthropomophizations go, I don’t think that “when life hands you lemons” is much of one. Which is to say it doesn’t seem to impart much conscious intent to life - more that life (specifically, the total collection of circumstances you’re encountering while alive) is dumping a raw deal on you like a conveyor belt might be dumping trash. Similarly with “fuck my life” - it’s a criticism of your circumstances that doesn’t really imply that your circumstances are alive. I honestly don’t see life getting anthropomophized too much - people say “I hate life” (or “I hate _my_ life”), but you don’t hear “Life hates _me_” a lot. If Life was a bigger target of anthropomophization you probably wouldn’t have be having such a hard time in this thread - people aren’t used to thinking of life as coherent entity, so they keep balking when you talk about it like it is without first laying the framework for considering that to be a real idea. Had your OP been “Mother Nature is God”, people would probably still have argued with you (se: forum title), but people wouldn’t be jumping down your throat for treating Mother Nature as a coherent concept. Suffice to say, not having heard much about an anthropomophized ‘Life’, I don’t actually believe in it - that would be like believing in theamdukaoil. Do you believe in theamdukaoil? Neither do I - I don’t know what it is so there’s nothing for me to believe _in_. All _that_ said, keeping in mind that this is just your odd way of trying to stay spiritual without having to believe in the typical sort of demon believed in by american theists, pointing your beliefs at a postulated completely neutral and indifferent “Life” entity would seem to be a harmless and potentially effective way of doing that - give or take the overloading of the term making it completely impossible to explain to anybody else. Well, that and your seeming insistence on asking us to pay attention to poetry and profundities and the like. Some of us have not a whit of poetry in our soul. (I for one traded all mine out for wit - it seems to serve me better during message board discussions.) ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/586 "2018-05-19T21:15:30Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Everyone agrees that words can (and often do) have multiple meanings. The reason you’re pissing so many people off is they believe that you’re attempting to play a shell game with the meanings in an attempt to…well, okay, I’m not sure what motives they’re ascribing you. Premeditated murder of the language? Being a woo with malicious intent? Something else because lists always have three examples? I dunno. But in any case they think you’re messing with them and/or yourself with deliberate semantic games, and it’s not doing much for your popularity. > > I dunno about life, but traffic lights _certainly_ hate me. > > As anthropomophizations go, I don’t think that “when life hands you lemons” is much of one. Which is to say it doesn’t seem to impart much conscious intent to life - more that life (specifically, the total collection of circumstances you’re encountering while alive) is dumping a raw deal on you like a conveyor belt might be dumping trash. Similarly with “fuck my life” - it’s a criticism of your circumstances that doesn’t really imply that your circumstances are alive. > > I honestly don’t see life getting anthropomophized too much - people say “I hate life” (or “I hate _my_ life”), but you don’t hear “Life hates _me_” a lot. If Life was a bigger target of anthropomophization you probably wouldn’t have be having such a hard time in this thread - people aren’t used to thinking of life as coherent entity, so they keep balking when you talk about it like it is without first laying the framework for considering that to be a real idea. Had your OP been “Mother Nature is God”, people would probably still have argued with you (se: forum title), but people wouldn’t be jumping down your throat for treating Mother Nature as a coherent concept. > > Suffice to say, not having heard much about an anthropomophized ‘Life’, I don’t actually believe in it - that would be like believing in theamdukaoil. Do you believe in theamdukaoil? Neither do I - I don’t know what it is so there’s nothing for me to believe _in_. > > All _that_ said, keeping in mind that this is just your odd way of trying to stay spiritual without having to believe in the typical sort of demon believed in by american theists, pointing your beliefs at a postulated completely neutral and indifferent “Life” entity would seem to be a harmless and potentially effective way of doing that - give or take the overloading of the term making it completely impossible to explain to anybody else. > > Well, that and your seeming insistence on asking us to pay attention to poetry and profundities and the like. Some of us have not a whit of poetry in our soul. (I for one traded all mine out for wit - it seems to serve me better during message board discussions.) There’s something you said here that twigged something for me. Perhaps it is not so much about anthropomorphizing life as it is about de-anthropomorphizing god. Why do people seem to insist on giving god human qualities? What if god is as impartial and objective as life itself? What if god demands nothing from us? That’s certainly part of the thrust of Neale Donald Walsch’s book, “What God Wants,” which is where I came to this idea. Perhaps that’s the part people aren’t getting based on what I’ve said so far. It’s clear enough in my mind, but I may not be expressing it clearly. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2018, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/587 "2018-05-19T23:24:46Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > There’s something you said here that twigged something for me. Perhaps it is not so much about anthropomorphizing life as it is about de-anthropomorphizing god. Why do people seem to insist on giving god human qualities? What if god is as impartial and objective as life itself? What if god demands nothing from us? That’s certainly part of the thrust of Neale Donald Walsch’s book, “What God Wants,” which is where I came to this idea. Perhaps that’s the part people aren’t getting based on what I’ve said so far. It’s clear enough in my mind, but I may not be expressing it clearly. Tradition is one reason. Gods from the very start, back through antiquity, have been anthropomorphized. (I briefly tried to get into _why_ they were anthropomorphized, but it was starting to look long and was basically speculation anyway. So instead I’ll just leave it as ‘that’s the way it’s been’.) Desire for control is another. This one I will try to explain. For the longest times people have sought to exert more and more control over their world, probably because in an out of control world you get eaten by a tiger. Science is one approach for controlling the world - understanding natural law and exploiting it. Religion provides an alternate approach - reasoning with it. Seeing ways to please it or satisfy it to make it more amenable to not loosing the tigers. And of course to reason with something, it has to be intelligent and aware. Projection is a third. People see humanity in _everything_. They see humanity in their pets. They see faces in toast. They do some third thing to fill out the list. People are quite literally _wired_ to see and recognize humans, and thus will look for human behavior even in things they imagine up. Desire for relevancy is a fourth. Humans exist. Things that are not humans exist. Compared to things that aren’t human, humans are outnumbered, outmassed, outvolumed, and otherwise outclassed in literally every possible way. So why would any god care about us, or even _notice_ us? God could be an insect and care about the insects - in which case we’re boned. That’s no appealing, so a god that cares about us - a humanocentric god, is best. And a god that cares about humans is probably _like_ humans, at least a little. There are doubtlessly more theoretically possible reasons, but I’ve probably rambled long enough for now. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2018, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/588 "2018-05-20T12:59:53Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > There’s something you said here that twigged something for me. Perhaps it is not so much about anthropomorphizing life as it is about de-anthropomorphizing god. Why do people seem to insist on giving god human qualities? What if god is as impartial and objective as life itself? What if god demands nothing from us? That’s certainly part of the thrust of Neale Donald Walsch’s book, “What God Wants,” which is where I came to this idea. Perhaps that’s the part people aren’t getting based on what I’ve said so far. It’s clear enough in my mind, but I may not be expressing it clearly. Sounds like whatever it is you & NDW are calling “god” current scientific theory calls “quantum foam”. Which is how we end up with something, i.e.: life, from nothing. Thus, by using a loaded word like “god” you are doing the anthropomorphisizing. Which is the main reason your hypothesis miserably fails its objectives. But I frankly don’t believe that the use of “god” in NDW’s hypothesis is innocent. I think it’s quite deliberate. I think he’s looking to accomplish two things: 1) Change the meaning of the word for his own means, which are, 2) Sell books and promote his new age indigo bullshit to those gullible enough to pay to attend his [mentoring program for a mere $2,300](http://www.nealedonaldwalsch.com/). Look, even if I grant you the latitude (which I don’t) to call life and the physical universe “god”, all your work is still ahead of you to explain what role such a thing would play in it, let alone identify the ever illusive god particle in the gaps. Oh, and may I say again, NDW is a shameless fucking charlatan. I feel dumber is some ways just for googling and reading though his B.S. web site. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2018, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/589 "2018-05-20T14:38:43Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Tradition is one reason. Gods from the very start, back through antiquity, have been anthropomorphized. (I briefly tried to get into _why_ they were anthropomorphized, but it was starting to look long and was basically speculation anyway. So instead I’ll just leave it as ‘that’s the way it’s been’.) > > Desire for control is another. This one I will try to explain. For the longest times people have sought to exert more and more control over their world, probably because in an out of control world you get eaten by a tiger. Science is one approach for controlling the world - understanding natural law and exploiting it. Religion provides an alternate approach - reasoning with it. Seeing ways to please it or satisfy it to make it more amenable to not loosing the tigers. And of course to reason with something, it has to be intelligent and aware. > > Projection is a third. People see humanity in _everything_. They see humanity in their pets. They see faces in toast. They do some third thing to fill out the list. People are quite literally _wired_ to see and recognize humans, and thus will look for human behavior even in things they imagine up. > > Desire for relevancy is a fourth. Humans exist. Things that are not humans exist. Compared to things that aren’t human, humans are outnumbered, outmassed, outvolumed, and otherwise outclassed in literally every possible way. So why would any god care about us, or even _notice_ us? God could be an insect and care about the insects - in which case we’re boned. That’s no appealing, so a god that cares about us - a humanocentric god, is best. And a god that cares about humans is probably _like_ humans, at least a little. > > There are doubtlessly more theoretically possible reasons, but I’ve probably rambled long enough for now. Tradition, desire for control, projection, desire for relevancy. These are good reasons and you explain them well. The need to anthropomorphize the “creator” is probably also born of the one thing we do know something about—childbirth. But in Judeo-Christian tradition at least we have a male giving birth to humans instead of a female. Eve was born of a rather bizarre type of c-section using one of Adam’s ribs, for example. It makes no sense and reflects perhaps man’s desire for relevance when only women can actually give birth, the most “godlike” thing humans can do. Why would god care about us unless he made us in his own image? How do dolphins and cats feel about that distinction, I wonder? If there is a god, we may well be made in god’s image, but it isn’t necessarily a physical image. It could be something as simple as the potential for empathy that makes us created “in god’s image.” I don’t know. Lots to think about, and thank you for a thoughtful post. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2018, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/590 "2018-05-20T16:33:13Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > Tradition, desire for control, projection, desire for relevancy. These are good reasons and you explain them well. The need to anthropomorphize the “creator” is probably also born of the one thing we do know something about—childbirth. But in Judeo-Christian tradition at least we have a male giving birth to humans instead of a female. Eve was born of a rather bizarre type of c-section using one of Adam’s ribs, for example. It makes no sense and reflects perhaps man’s desire for relevance when only women can actually give birth, the most “godlike” thing humans can do. Why would god care about us unless he made us in his own image? How do dolphins and cats feel about that distinction, I wonder? If there is a god, we may well be made in god’s image, but it isn’t necessarily a physical image. It could be something as simple as the potential for empathy that makes us created “in god’s image.” I don’t know. Lots to think about, and thank you for a thoughtful post. In christianity I always got the vibe that it was less like childbirth and more like a craftsman making things, like a potter making pots from dirt. (For example, he made Adam _from dirt_.) A person can get pretty attached to their creations (I’m very protective of some of mine), but the ‘craftsman’ angle avoids any implication of equality - in actual childbirth the children eventually grow to equal or even surpass their parents. In christanity, or at least most variants of it: not so much. Not that I’m getting the impression that we’re equals to your ‘Life’ thing/entity/force either, mind you. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2018, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/591 "2018-05-20T19:16:12Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > In christianity I always got the vibe that it was less like childbirth and more like a craftsman making things, like a potter making pots from dirt. (For example, he made Adam _from dirt_.) A person can get pretty attached to their creations (I’m very protective of some of mine), but the ‘craftsman’ angle avoids any implication of equality - in actual childbirth the children eventually grow to equal or even surpass their parents. In christanity, or at least most variants of it: not so much. > > Not that I’m getting the impression that we’re equals to your ‘Life’ thing/entity/force either, mind you. In church, they talk often about “eternal life.” I’m not sure how that one’s supposed to be defined. On the surface, it sounds like life that never ends, but I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be for the individual person or more as the thing/entity/force idea. By the biological definition, life definitely would have had to have a beginning—there was a time before life existed even if the planet did and the conditions were ripe for supporting life. And presumably, there could also come a time when life will cease to exist. Anywhere. I have a hard time envisioning that situation. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2018, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/592 "2018-05-21T17:38:51Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > In church, they talk often about “eternal life.” I’m not sure how that one’s supposed to be defined. On the surface, it sounds like life that never ends, but I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be for the individual person or more as the thing/entity/force idea. By the biological definition, life definitely would have had to have a beginning—there was a time before life existed even if the planet did and the conditions were ripe for supporting life. And presumably, there could also come a time when life will cease to exist. Anywhere. I have a hard time envisioning that situation. Er, if you’re talking about church, christian church, then I’m 99.99% certain that when they say eternal life they mean individuals living forever as individuals. That remaining 0.01% of slack I only leave because there are probably some sects out there that are completely nuts. To a materialist, that which we classify as life could indeed cease at some point - it would take a pretty hardcore apocalypse because bacteria are everywhere and pretty resilient, but it could certainly happen. And while some people might be distressed at all life ending (heck, some weirdos might even be bothered by humanity _alone_ being purged) I don’t think any of us would deny that it’s possible. Death happens. (And if you’re just talking about life _on earth_ ending, that’s even easier to imagine - just drop the earth into the sun. Or wait a few billion years and the sun will expand and come to us. Easy.) ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2018, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/593 "2018-05-22T04:38:45Z")
I keep on going, guess I’ll never know why Life’s been good to me so far. - J. Walsh Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2018, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/594 "2018-05-22T13:03:55Z")
“Mitosis” - var. attrib. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2018, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/595 "2018-05-22T16:15:36Z")
> [@Biffster](#): > > I keep on going, guess I’ll never know why > Life’s been good to me so far. > > - J. Walsh This would be the “the total collection of circumstances you’re encountering while alive” definition of the term, of course. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2018, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/596 "2018-05-22T17:17:14Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > This would be the “the total collection of circumstances you’re encountering while alive” definition of the term, of course. I think so. And sometimes barely alive, like those parties sometimes until four. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2018, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192/597 "2018-07-06T06:46:36Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Er, if you’re talking about church, christian church, then I’m 99.99% certain that when they say eternal life they mean individuals living forever as individuals. That remaining 0.01% of slack I only leave because there are probably some sects out there that are completely nuts. > > To a materialist, that which we classify as life could indeed cease at some point - it would take a pretty hardcore apocalypse because bacteria are everywhere and pretty resilient, but it could certainly happen. And while some people might be distressed at all life ending (heck, some weirdos might even be bothered by humanity _alone_ being purged) I don’t think any of us would deny that it’s possible. Death happens. > > (And if you’re just talking about life _on earth_ ending, that’s even easier to imagine - just drop the earth into the sun. Or wait a few billion years and the sun will expand and come to us. Easy.) You raise many good points about what life means in a variety of contexts. It was this kind of conversation I was hoping for when I first started this thread. It’s amazing how quickly things can get less than pleasant unfortunately. Anyway, hope you’re still doing well, begbert2. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/god-and-life/813192.md?page=29)