Meaning of life?

Great Debates
1

I’ve been following the God/faith/religion threads here for the past few months, absorbing and digesting all the nuggets of wisdom and folly contained therein. I’ve also been involved in numerous conversations with a very conservative Bible-literalist friend of mine during that time, and the other day we were discussing the “meaning of life,” or more precisely “Why are we here?” His answer was along the lines of “To worship and glorify God,” which was acceptable and consistent within his world-view. He then turned it around and asked me (he calls me a “devout atheist”) why I thought we (human beings) were here. I thought for a moment and said “To reproduce.” He scoffed at this, and I wasn’t completely satisfied with that answer at the time, but lately I’ve come to the opinion that it makes a lot of sense.

Human beings are life forms, evolved from earlier life, just like every other plant and animal species on the planet. One of, if not the primary characteristic of life is to reproduce itself. Or, as Richard Dawkins explains, our bodies are just vessels for our selfish genes. We exist simply to reproduce and pass our genes on.

So when I thought back on the “Why are we here?” question, it seemed to be a nonsense question. It’s like asking “Why do fish live in water?” There is no why, there is just a what. Fish live in water. Life reproduces.

So I suppose I’m asking other “atheists” why do you think we are here? Or does the question even make any sense?

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.” - Bob Dylan

“‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher.
‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’”
-Ecclesiastes 1:1 (NIV)

2

Seems like you’ve accurately described the athiest viewpoint. As such, the meaning of life would be what people decide it to be.

Curiosity question for your friend…if the meaning is to worship and glorify God, then couldn’t that have been accomplished with souls staying in Heaven? Why create a separated Earth & mortal life? (I know…freewill, original sin, etc.)

Either way, I certainly appreciate the grandeur of the universe.

3

I think you mean Ecclesiastes 1:2, but I’m impressed with anyone who can spell that book to begin with :wink: A very Taoist book.

I like Ecclesiastes 2:26 “To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. (but this too is meaningless)”

Eat drink and be merry all the days of your life!

4

That’s the meaning of life.

5

From the perspective of an athiest, why would life have to have any meaning at all? What is the meaning of a rock?

(I’m not saying this to be disparaging to athiests, by the way. This is what I would think if I was an athiest. Nothing wrong with it.)

6

Geez, furthur…your first post, and you break out with the Mother of All Questions!

My guess is there are a couple of billion answers to this question. It’s kind of harsh to say life has no meaning, but it may not. Humans tend to want to compartmentalize and understand and reason and seek knowledge. So our lives mustmean something. What was the meaning of life for that fly you just swatted? Maybe to annoy you so it could become a little winged martyr for the other flies. Maybe it was just looking for some food and a mate (your theory).

I think the to-serve-God angle puts people on par with a lapdog. God says, “Do My bidding, glorify Me, spread My Word, fetch the paper!” And we get a pat on the head, and a “good boy”.

Life is what we make it, and want to do my living before I die. After that, you gots no guarantees.

7

how the hell do you felch a paper? I don’t think I get- oh wait. ‘Fetch’. Nevermind.

8

Has anyone ever considered how self-glorifying such a question is? Because it seems to me the answer (for those that ascribe to one) is completely vanity- or ego-driven…be it intellectual, physical, spiritual…

Even to say that one’s life has no meaning is as self-serving (strangely) as it is trite. All I’m willing to say is that we mortals are not given free reign over the secrets of the universe, and so in our search for them, we will believe only what we (as imperfect beings)want to believe.

Or maybe I’m guilty of committing the foul of which I accuse others, in addition to being arrogant and pedantic. C’est la vie.

9

Reproduction is descriptive of every living species, and is the reason each species continues. Reproduction, in my opinion, is merely an aspect of life, not the meaning of life.

A friend of mine once asked me “What is the meaning of life?”

My answer was “Life has no meaning except that which we as individuals or groups of individuals attribute to it.”

Life just is.

Sortta what lastgasp said, I guess.

10

The purpose of life is to crush your enemy posters, drive them before you, and to listen to the lamentations of the SDMB moderators.

11

Whenever this question comes up my thoughts always turn to that great philosopher Douglas Adams. As he so cleverly illustrated in his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books, if we were to receive the answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, we wouldn’t know what it meant because we don’t know what the <i>question</i> is – or else we can’t reach consensus on it. In the OP furthur’s friend answered the question of why god created humans. furthur had a different answer because his question was different. Someone else might think the question is really “What is my personal purpose in life?” and that question would need yet another answer, and so on.

12

Another aspect of this “existing only to reproduce” idea is on a much more personal level than some vague, abstract “meaning of it all.” I think a great deal of people’s day-to-day behavior and thoughts are a direct result of our drive to reproduce. By “reproduction” I mean more than simply having babies. It consists of 1) survival, 2) reproduction, and 3) raising our offspring in the best possible way to allow them to reproduce; thus insuring our genes will be around when we’re rotting in the ground.

So why do I have a job? Why do I drive carefully? Why do I like steak? So I can stay alive for as long as possible, allowing me to reproduce.

Why do I turn and look at a attractive woman as she walks away from me? Why do men want to sleep with every woman they find good looking (deep down in your sinful heart you know it’s true)? Why is the sex drive as strong as the need to eat? Because my body wants me to reproduce.

Why are woman more selective in choosing a sex partner than men? Why did I get married? Why do we find babies so cute? Why do I care when someone from my state dies in an accident more than someone from another country? Because I want to protect my offspring or anyone who may be carrying my genes in them.

Of course none of this is a concious choice. No one looks at a beautiful woman and thinks “Her hip to waist ratio is .7! Therefore she is fertile and would make a good breeding partner.” You just feel it in your gut.

I’ve read opinions (I believe Jared Diamond wrote an article on this) that even creating or collecting art is a way for a man or woman to subconciously advertise their ability to be a good partner. Michael Shermer just published a book, Why We Believe, in which he theorizes that the belief in God developed as a byproduct of a way of thinking that evolved to allow us to better survive.

And while this seems to make sense to me, it is also disturbing. I think our culture, even the secular aspects of it, views humanity as being something special. But we behave just like any other “lower” animal when you get down to it, except we’re more self-aware of our behavior.

13

In my atheistic point of view, the Meaning of Life is what ever you make of it. Personally I live for those moment when you see that you made someone smile, or when you are swept over with a wave of emotion while singing at the top of your lungs at your favorite car driving down the highway with the windows down. It’s life’s little things that give it meaning.

14

Those males that had strong sex drives and reproduced with many females are the ones whose genes are dominating the gene pool; those males that didn’t reproduce as much have fewer genes in the gene pool.

Females who have sex with many males can still only reproduce only every nine months, unlike males, so those females who invested time in raising their offspring and did not abandon them are the females whose genes are more likely to be in the gene pool.

Cute babies in any species (I think they called that neotony in an animal behavior course I took) are more likely to be cared for than abandoned. The ones that were not attractive to their animal mothers were more likely to be abandoned and not live to reproduce and leave genes in the gene pool.

Having said all this, it still doesn’t make reproduction the meaning of life; life is a mechanism for passing life on.

15

Great analysis, furthur.

I’ve come to much the same conclusion myself.

Just about everything we do can be broken down to survival and sex. And we don’t even need to know this to act on it.

But perhaps there is something deeper. Why do we need to believe in gods? Maybe it’s an extension of our survival instinct, since we know we will die.

Perhaps intellectuallism will die, since it is really not needed for our survival (Big logical step here, I’m drunk). Just look at the Jerry Springer audience, if anything, they can simply out-breed us.

My thoughts are too scattered, I’ll come back later.

16

Disclaimer: I do not qualify as an atheist unless you are rigidly traditional in a western way about the definition of God.

One of the areas of life in which I am at my most traditionally PAGAN is a belief in the centrality and sacred quality of sexuality and the sex drive. By extension, the revalorization of feeling to the point that conceptualization and cognition is understood to be an afterproduct of what one feels, an interpretation of it.

So, rather than a person BEING a mind and HAVING a sex drive), consider a person to BE a sex drive with a mind. If you understand it reallly well and pursue and follow it effectively, it will lead you to great happiness. (You will help create of the world an environment both safe and exciting in which to share love and sex with someone with whom you have established the perfect balance of connection and freedom.)

So it would be crude but not entirely inaccurate to say the purpose of life is to get laid. But do it well.

17

If the meaning of life is to reproduce, does that mean that gays, lesbians, infertile people, and people who never have children have meaningless lives?

18

I think the meaning of life is to live and learn and move to a higher spiritual level. I’m agnostic, but I tend to take a few thoughts and ideas from already formed religions. I think there is some kind of higher power, or some system in which the soul travels along through one life on to the next until it fills its roles and learns all of life’s lessons. People don’t live just to pass on their genes, they live to make the most of what goes on in the universe. I guess somewhere we’re all just entertainment for a higher life form, doing silly things and getting in arguments and wars, etc., all for the sake of reaching someone’s unattainable goal, and following what someone wrote as “law for salvation” millenia ago. Life is a thing to be experienced, and lived to the fullest, not pondered over in why we’re here.

19

People in these categories don’t have meaningless lives. That’s like saying people with mental developmental problems don’t really think at all. People just have different journeys in life and each of us have a different purpose and a different lesson to learn before moving on to the next one.

20

Although as I said before I think it is a nonsense question to ask what the meaning of life is, gays and lesbians and infertile people, etc. still have the desire to have sex. They still have the subconcious need to reproduce, they just can’t (for various reasons.)

Something I’ve puzzled over is, since there is strong evidence that homosexuality is genetic, and is counterproductive to reproduction, why is it still around? Assuming a behavior would only be passed on if it helps us to survive better or reproduce better, what benefit does homosexuality possess? Or is it a byproduct of some other traits that helps us survive? How is it that the combination of genes that leads to homosexuality has survived millions of years of evolution?