BTW, even if atheists gave depressing answers (i.e. no morals, life is pointless) to these questions it doesn’t prove that God exists. In a similar way, if a theist gave uplifting, inspirational answers (a perfect God is the answer) to those questions it doesn’t prove that God exists. I mean it might be a nice thought to believe that Jews were never exterminated, but that doesn’t prove anything.
I picked up on that early – his questions were asked from a particularly myopic viewpoint as regards atheistic morality, but were not, according to him, asked with offensive intent. The basic question is, if it isn’t God’s commandments guiding what you do, what does guide it? – why do you behave morally, without external motivators?
How about a sense of self-worth and self-acceptance? God made me; I’m a worthwhile person. He did the exact same thing with regard to [fill in a name of someone who upsets or offends you]. Therefore, it’s incumbent on me, out of a sense of who I am, to treat him/her in much the same way as I myself would wish to be treated – and to do it out of a sense of connectedness, agapetic love, for God, His Universe, and the people whom He created and who matter to Him as much as I.
See above. It’s not merely the long arm of His Law, either – it’s a sense of the worth of others.
Fuck Heaven and Hell – isn’t decency and mutual happiness here on Earth important enough to be worth pursuing, for its own sake?
Or, perhaps, God created every person in His image – and if I disrespect and insult any other person, I’m doing that to an image of God. I want to see joy in the faces of others, because that engenders joy in me as well.
You mistake something important. God doesn’t expect worship from us for His own ego-boost – if He wanted that, He’s got seraphs that are many steps above us Australopithecines-with-haircuts-and-brain-boosts. *He wants worship from us because of its value to us.
There was a plaque on the wall of a priest I used to know:
The idea of true humility – of esteeming oneself as worthwhile, but not more worthwhile than the guy standing next to you, or the kid idly tossing a ball down the street – is inherent in that. And by acknowledging that there is Someone beside whose power and wisdom and compassion, your own is pretty poor 14th choice in comparison, engenders that sense of humility.
The world doesn’t revolve around you; it revolves around Me. 
Well, there’s something wrong with that picture, too…
Sorry I got involved in preaching theistic perspective in a thread about atheism – but hey, one needs to deal with misperceptions where they occur.
I was a very devout Christian until I was 13, and then realized there was no god. It was very “freeing” to me. That does not mean that those who believe are slaves, or fools, or anything else. I think the best analogy might be the Copernican theory; once you accepted that the earth was not the center of the universe you didn’t have to go through all those complicated hoops about why the stars and planets moved the way they did.
What drives your morals?
Being human. My specific morality seems to dovetail well with the five precepts, the golden rule, etc. At bottom, I believe it is driven by compassion.
IMO, all gods are the creation of humans. It is perfectly okay to believe that you get your ethics from religion, but in reality it’s a circular process. Religion is created out of characteristic human impulses, then is drawn upon as a codification of those impulses. I don’t have enough hubris to say that having religion as the intermediate step is unnecessary for a lot of people; I can say it’s unnecessary for me.
I don’t worry much about grand schemes.
What makes your life truly meaningful?
The ability to sense what is around me and to process my sensations. The quest to reduce suffering, both my own and others’. I don’t think it can be broken down by the specific things I do; it’s just living.
What is the meaning of your existence?
My life has as much meaning, or lack of meaning, as any other life. Okay, I like to think it’s a bit more advanced than that of a fire ant, but I feel at least that an opossum’s life has has much inate meaning as mine, except that with mine, I’m the person involved. But we are all connected. We all experience the world. What there is is a lot. I don’t feel the need to add that which is not.
Ok… I guess people are fairly important even if they are born sinful.
I think some things that are right or wrong according to God (and therefore his followers) aren’t necessarily synonymous with decency and mutual happiness… or at least some OT things like Exodus 32, Deut 13 & 20.
I didn’t really say God wanted an ego-boost. I just mean that to be saved you’d have to worship God at some point (I mean I think “love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength” is kind of about worship…). BTW, why do you think you exist, or why people in general exist?
oops I went off topic too.
Well, no. I disagree with your statement. These “answers” aren’t actually answers at all.
Let’s take an example from your post :
How is answering that different from an atheist answering : “I’ve got a special relationship with my family and my SO and I’m hopefully going to live a happy life?”
You derive some sort of satisfaction from your special relationship. So does the atheist. But in both cases, why does it really matter that you achieve this satisfaction?
You believe you’re going to live forever, I believe I’m going to live for, say, 80 years. What makes your life more meaningful than mine? The fact that it will in your opinion be eternal still doesn’t give you an answer to the question “What’s the purpose/ meaning of life?”
As other posters mentionned, the assumption in the OP that the existence of a god or the belief in a afterlife in itself somehow gives an answer to the questions about the meaning of life, though widespread, is an erroneous one. The OP doesn’t have any more valid answers than us atheists to his own questions, so it has to be pointed out.
The short answer is that I am smart enough to see that for me to just recklessly pursue my own wants and needs, and do whatever the heck I want, doesn’t work.
The rather longer answer is that I have an understanding of the world I live in, and of the many ways in which short-term and unadulterated pursuit of my own immediate wants and desires does not produce optimum results – either for myself or for the society and culture to which I belong, and wish to carry on belonging.
Also, I can understand the many ways in which I have a contract, so to speak, with everyone else in my society, to balance my own wants and needs against those of others, and with some regard for the best interests of my social group collectively. I can learn and respect the mechanisms which have been devised over a long period of time to try and achieve a balanced society in which personal liberty and freedom is not absolute, but is modified according to generally agreed rules and precepts which are deemed to be best for the collective good. These do sometimes need to be revised and updated, but we have mechanisms for achieving this also.
I am also able to feel emotions of love, kindness and kinship, of warmth and friendship, towards other people (some more than others), and to empathise with them to the extent that I understand that they have their needs, wants, desires and goals just as I have mine, and that my own do not necessarily take precedence – implying a need to find ways to accommdate everyone as best we can.
I can also take my own knowledge of fear, pain and hurt to understand that I do not wish to cause these feelings in anyone else, and my knowledge of love, warmth and affection to know that I would like to bring about these feelings in others.
All of these factors: mature balance of what the Freudians call the id and the superego, the stated or implied social contract, emotional empathy and attitude towards pain and suffering, fuse together to provide a moral framework for my actions.
The even longer answer is: go read ‘The Science Of Good & Evil’ by Michael Shermer.
In my opinion, my goal in life is to fulfill my potential – a goal which will necessarily involve helping others to do the same. None of chooses what our potential happens to be, as this tends to derive from factors beyond our control (such as genes, role models, access to ideas and education, and formative experiences). What we can choose is how diligently and successfully we pursue the fulfilment of that potential in the medium- and long-term. To the extent that I manage to fulfill my potential, I will experience a feeling that my life is worthwhile. Part of this feeling will derive from my own emotional machinery, and part will derive from my successful and productive interactions with other people.
Meaning is never intrinsic. Meaning and significance are both necessarily governed by context. The same thing can be described as a letter ‘O’, a sign meaning zero, a depiction of the sun in a simple sketch, or an abbreviation for oxygen. The science of semiology takes this a step further, and refracts meaning (or at least anything that may be referred to as a ‘sign’) into a synthesis of sign, signifier and signified. So does my own life matter? In the context of the terms I have expressed in my second answer, above, then yes, it does. It matters to me and to other people. In a larger and different context, such as the greater cosmological view that focuses on events of great duration or magnitude (such as millions of years it takes for a solar system to form) then one would say no, my life has little meaning according to that particular yardstick and in that context.
Harimad-sol, my point about 99% of inmates being Christian was that their faith did not stop them from victimizing their fellow man. And your point about them not being “good Christians”. Don’t forget the bumper sticker: Christians aren’t perfect, just saved.
I think the OP says a lot about the poster’s motivation for not running rampant on society. I’ll be a bit more cautious around Christians now, lest they suddenly lose their faith in close proximity.
I am neither offended by the questions in the OP nor by what I perceive to be the tone behind them.
It’s a combination of this:
and this:
The former, I believe, is a result of the latter. Morality, to some extent, is a hardwired phenomenon, enforced and reinforced by the crucible of day-to-day survival, particularly when our species began to get organized and to carve a life out of the wilderness. A tribe that cooperates and can trust one another will have an advantage over a tribe that considers one another unreliable and works only for individual survival and gain. Over time, the tribes that have (a) biological bases for cooperative, “moral” behavior and (b) cultural mechanisms for strengthening these behavioral traits and quashing the alternatives will sweep the non-cooperative tribes before them. And no, it’s not an oversight that the evolutionary pressures I’m describing have both biological and cultural components; I believe both are not just important but fundamental.
This is why I have a “feeling” that lying, stealing, murdering, etc., is “wrong.” It isn’t really something I can put into words; I can’t really explain why I feel the way I do. Some people have tried to explain why we have these feelings, and those explanations, in my opinion, are called religion. If you need the explanation for the feelings, hey, it’s not my business. You can rationalize your feelings however you like; it’s your life. For my part, I choose to rationalize them based on biology, neurology, and anthropology. It’s quite telling to me that pretty much every culture has some variant on the Golden Rule, which asks us to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place and predict how we (and therefore that person) would react to a proposed action, and thus decide whether the action is “right” or “wrong” based on that extension of empathy. It’s further quite telling that the various cultural rationalizations of the Golden Rule are all over the board, conceptually, linked only by the basic underlying philosophy. This to me is one of the earmarks of a post hoc explanation.
Therefore, I behave morally because I have this intuition about which behaviors are socially correct and which are socially incorrect, and I choose to follow this intuition because (as ianzin and John Mace term it) I understand the social compact or contract that binds our civilization together. If this contract fails, civilization ends. It is therefore incumbent upon me to hold up my part of it, and to support enforcement of those parts of it that I believe others should be required to follow (the aforementioned murdering, stealing, etc.).
The parts that seem extraneous to the basic contract, on the other hand, stuff like eating fish on Friday, in my view cannot and should not be enforced by society. People are free to engage in those behaviors if they choose, if it “feels right” for them to do it, but they cannot require me to participate, just as I would never ask others to engage in behaviors that I deem important to myself but that I recognize are extraneous to the basic contract (e.g., eschewing celebrity gossip). Social confusion and stress arise when people’s religions entangle the survival-oriented parts of the contract with the foofaraw that surround them, and when they attempt to mandate the extraneous portions along with the important bits. Those get lumped in with “morality” even though they really have nothing to do with why the impulse came up in the first place; they’re an aspect of the conceptual structure but not part of the foundation.
But note that the social contract as I see it requires me to let people believe what they want to believe and behave as they want to behave as long as those beliefs and behaviors don’t go beyond the bounds of the social contract in general. If a religion explicitly requires its followers to kill other people, that religion should be quashed. At the same time, if an atheist believes the lack of Godly oversight means all behavior is permissible and starts killing other people, that atheist should be restrained and punished and permanently secured if rehabilitation turns out to be impossible. On the other hand, if your religion requires you to wear special undergarments made of a certain cloth, you should feel free to do that, and you won’t get any judgment at all from me; it’s your life. Basically, it’s all in the nature of the social contract.
Regarding questions two and three, about meaning: My life has meaning to me, and to my friends and family. My life has no meaning to a random schmoe in Belgium, or Tanzania, or Peru, because they don’t know I exist, and it certainly has no meaning to the universe at large, which is not sentient. The meaning of my life is what I choose to make of it, and what my friends and family think of me. Period.
Anything else?
My morals are driven by the belief that everyone should be as happy as possible. However, I can’t know exactly what would make others happy or unhappy, so I treat others as I would like to be treated.
We’ll all be dead in a billion years from now, so no. On a smaller scale, it does matter.
Happiness. Mostly mine but also others’.
Short term, yes. Long term, no.
Yes, it does. It isn’t necessary for a set of moral rules to have come from a religious organization or text for them to be good rules.
Don’t kill people. Respect your parents and elders. Don’t steal things. Be true to your spouse. These are generally good rules (within reason and each having exceptions, of course), even in the absense of a Christian God. Just because I reject the latter doesn’t mean that I reject the former. My personal belief is that the rules that you find in religious texts tend to be the codification of societal standards that are then attributed to a higher power to give them more weight.
There’s a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries set in a men’s club in Manhattan. Whenever the club has a visitor, the first thing the members do is ask him to justify his existence, ie, what have you done for the world that justifies your consumption of its precious resources.
My career: I’ve taught over a hundred children how to read and do basic math. This I find fulfilling, and from a pragmatic point of view, I have given something back to the world in exchange for all of the wonderful things I have taken from it.
Money: A means of storing value and obtaining necessities and luxuries. I don’t really understand people who use money as a means of keeping track of success. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think money is important. It is, at least up to the point that one is able to provide oneself with all of the necessities of life. Being poor can be a serious obstacle to having a happy, fulfilling life, but being rich doesn’t guarantee the opposite. I don’t know where the line is, but to me, money is simply a pragmatic necessity. I have enough to enable me to choose who I want to be and the life I want to live.
Romance: Romance is such an inadequate word. Fulfilling relationships of all sorts. My relationship with Mrs. Six is a cornerstone of my happiness. My job is another. The joy I take from great and not so great works of art, from appreciating the beauty that this world offers and that is produced by humanity.
Everyone’s life matters to some degree. Some have a positive impact, some a negative. I don’t think it’s possible to life your life without its having some impact on someone else. The fact that my being who and what I am makes my wife a happier, more fulfilled person gives my life meaning. The fact that I have a positive impact on the lives of hundreds of young people gives my life meaning. My coming out threads from the past couple of weeks seem to have had some small positive impact on a few people, and that in a small way, helps to give my life meaning. Every interaction that I have with another person, either directly or indirectly, that has some positive outcome for one or both of us, helps to give my life meaning.
Yes, for the time that we’re here, every life matters. Some in good ways, some in bad, but every life matters.
I merely wanted clarification. Thank you.
Of course it doesn’t prove anything. Non-theists giving positive, empirical answers likewise doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
You sure about that? :dubious: 
I can’t pretend to empathize with you on that, since I’ve never experienced such an epiphany. I suppose I can accept that it felt “freeing” to you, but I refuse to accept, as I said earlier, the “high and mighty” attitude I perceive from some non-believers.
Forgive me for butting in, but I found this intriguing. You see, I am a devout Christian but I don’t act the way I do out of fear of punishment or desire to please but because I sincerely believe it’s the Right way to act. I’ve seen the effects of cruelty, of failure to love our neighbors as ourselves as Christ commanded. I’ve felt those effects myself and they nearly destroyed me. Yes it’s what my preacher tells me God wants me to do, but some of the things I do, most notably the stand I’ve taken on homosexuality directly contradicts what other Christians tell me they think God wants me to do. While I go to a church with three wonderful priests, what they tell me God says isn’t important in the end. I may go to heaven; I may go to hell. Either way, it really isn’t important. What is important is how my life reflects the faith I so loudly profess. I know how much small kindnesses have meant to me. If I fail to show them to others, if I indulge in deliberate cruelty, I’m doing wrong and I don’t need Christian faith to tell me that.
I’m also intrigued by your comments about evolution and the big bang. You see, the more I learn about the wondrously intricate way the universe works, the more my awe and wonder at God has done deepens. Is it so unreasonable to suppose that God could set in motion the events that caused the big bang to happen, dinosaurs to roam the earth, and me to sit at my computer and type words which will be seen by people I may never meet? As someone else said, it’s a truly marvelous, wondrous world, and I intend to enjoy the daylights out of it! I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a ball of yarn transform itself into a sweater as I sit and knit. Surely God could have enjoyed the pleasure of seeing a collection of atoms transform themselves into a world populated with thousands of curious creatures, including the most curious of all, those who sometimes remember to worship something they cannot truly imagine.
Curiously,
CJ
Probably as sure as you are that Zeus and Apollo aren’t up there on Mount Olympus.
Apollo is Roman , Zeus is Greek. Are the Greek and Roman Gods
uniting at the top of Mt. Everest despite their differences, FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN?
finally someone is thinking about the children.
Apollo swung both ways. Must have been the first greco/roman wrestler.
That was perfect. * applauds *
Not unreasonable, just superfluous to the cause of wonder IMHO.
I kinda agree with Dostojevskij on this matter: “Everyone is responsible for everything that happens on earth”. Even though the things I do to my closest ones may seem “meaningless” on the “grander scale”, each of us are tied together in a gigantic network of people because we are all sharing the same planet. What I do may effect people wherever they are, which has become increasingly obvious with the internet. If I am depressed I can submit a thread here and feel comfort in what a guy from Paraguay says. If I save a stranger kid from being hit by a car, I will also save the driver from the eternal guilt which in turn will make his friends happier which in turn will make their families happier which in turn will affect someone from across the pacific. We are all connected. What you do is important, no matter the scale.