T
tonyrey
Guest
- Entirely
- To some extent
- Not at all
- Status
I
InJesusItrust
Guest
If I were still an atheist I would say entirely. Here is why: all things are in vain. You seek money and it is useless when you are dead. You seek fame and it is useless when life goes extinct. You seek happy memories and they are gone as soon as you die and enter nothingness. You seek to leave a mark in the universe, and it won’t make an iota of difference because the universe will end some day. What was the point of evolution? Billions up years of progress that makes no difference. Without eternity all things are in vain, and it makes no difference whether you ever existed or not. Life transitions from dust to dust.
Since I do believe in God: only partially, and probably because I cannot see what God sees. Life seems absurd because we keep on living in this world even after finding God. It would be nice if God took us to heaven the instant we accept Him. I just accept that He has a purpose for this.
Since I do believe in God: only partially, and probably because I cannot see what God sees. Life seems absurd because we keep on living in this world even after finding God. It would be nice if God took us to heaven the instant we accept Him. I just accept that He has a purpose for this.
R
Robert_Sock
Guest
- We live in a VERY RAPIDLY changing world that causes things to become chaotic. We are in the midst of a digital revolution that forces the world to become chaotic. Too much pain and suffering in this world. Trying to find meaning in our world, without deep religiosity, is bound to lead to absurdity. The morale in the secular world is very low overall.
L
Linux
Guest
I
InJesusItrust
Guest
It was this realization, along with intense suffering, that opened my mind to the possibility that God must exist and so I sought Him. With glee, I found Him.
I agree; but it would seem that some atheists prefer it that way.
Life is absurd without the eternal.
G
Garyjohn2
Guest
ab·surd
/əbˈsərd/
Adjective
/əbˈsərd/
Adjective
- (of an idea or suggestion) Wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate: “so you think I’m a spy? How absurd!”.
- (of a person or a person’s behavior or actions) Foolish; unreasonable.
W
WmJackP
Guest
The significance of life is —to use a worn out maxim–“in the eye of the beholder”. Certainly, life is full of meaning when one has objectives, goals and purpose. Whether one is a believer or not, whether one is physically impaired or not. Witness, Stephen Hawking. His life is rife with purpose and he is wheelchair bound and certainly not a believer in any sense that you are.
However, also witness, someone who appears to “have it all” and surprisingly goes home some evening and ends his own life. A life without meaning is a life of dispair and hopelessness.
What gives meaning is having a purpose, having a goal, creating for one’s self a set of values or principles by which life is invested with meaning.
I’d recommend reading Camus’ work that describes the man doomed to rolling the bolder up a hugh incline only to have it fall back and he repeats it on into infinitum. Meaning is derived ultimately from the self and the values he creates for himself. You give meaning to your life, I suspect, by your system of belief. I have found meaning in my children and in my studies and professional life. I have a cousin who has never found her way, and, that is sad, but, ultimately it is a personal failure on her part.
L
Linux
Guest
In a world without objective meaning and purpose there is no such thing as fault. That is a fantasy that you indulge in to justify your own existence; it certainly isn’t any less of a fantasy than believing that life has an objective meaning and purpose.
S
SonSearcher
Guest
When you find God, and serve God… life becomes so full of reason there is no room for absurdity.
W
WmJackP
Guest
We assign “fault” ever day in our courts. People spend years of jail because someone has determined that they “are at fault”.
What you really mean to say is “without objective truth there is no such thing as absolutes”. And I would agree with thast statement. However, there there are no absolutes. This doesn’t mean, hoever, that we cannot have “values” which are subjectively derived. In fact, I believe I have given some excellent examples of that. My cousin, for example, has no values and her life is “meaningless”. Stephen Hawking, however, does, and, he has a purposeful life. It is, as I have argued, “in the eye of the beholder”, regardless of how passionately you may wish it possess a qulity of absoluteness.
I
InJesusItrust
Guest
But the real question is if the purpose is true. Truth is absolute by its very nature, being true regardless of opinion. If the purpose of life is not true it is fantasy. A thug can overpower everybody and declare some people meaningless and he would be right because if nothing is absolute the powerful make the absolutes.
I
Iron_Donkey
Guest
Just because the courts say it exists doesn’t mean that it really does. I can pretend that there is fault, the courts can pretend that there is fault, but unless it is based on something real then it’s no more than a fantasy no matter how many people join in it.
You say it is “in the eye of the beholder,” but frankly, who cares about the beholder? What you’re saying, so far as I can tell, is that there is meaning if I decide there is, but on what basis do my decisions matter? I would be creating a fantasy that is unsupported by reason, which is pretty close to the definition of absurd. In such a universe there would be no real difference between claiming that we should all devote our lives to “loving” (whatever that would turn out to mean) our fellow men, and claiming that we should all devote our lives to paining all elephants pink.
Really, the phrase “There are no absolutes” is self contradictory, but leaving that aside for the moment - if there is no absolute meaning, then there is in fact no meaning. I can pretend that there is, but it doesn’t make it real, and as soon as I die even my pretending is gone and it turns out that my meaning didn’t exist anyway. It was no more than a way of making me feel warm and fuzzy inside until I returned to dust and, frankly, from such a viewpoint it doesn’t matter if I feel warm and fuzzy inside either, so the whole thing is an exercise in absurdity. Absurd ideas I create for myself in order to accomplish an absurd goal with no relevance to anything except its own absurdity at all.
R
R_C
Guest
Wait, I am confused. Do you mean “life in the manner of the world” or life in itself?
The life in the manner of the world is quite absurd, because it goes against God’s will (who wants everyone to be at peace and with a joy that is full). Those who are of the light try to bring some order at the price of suffering, and they do so because otherwise it would be an absurd way of doing things…we saw where it lead to: the destruction of the world. It happened once with the Flood, and God prevents it from happening again by sending Christ, and Christ by sending us.
Now, if you mean life as in itself, life is not absurd: it is a share in God’s life, since only He is. In fact, it is all the more extraordinary when we consider that the life on this earth is but a tiny fraction of the life of our immortal soul.
L
Linux
Guest
I am not talking about the faults that harms a nations subjective self-interests. I am talking about the kind of fault you erroneously and self-righteously applied to your friend; or perhaps what you meant was that her behaviour was harming your subjective self interests.
And the idea of somebody inventing there own values has no relevance to whether or not it is rational to judge people according to those values. You have a set of self-made values or preferred rules that you used to judge your friends condition. She might be at fault in your imagination according to your subjective preferences. But in the real world perhaps she sees life for what it really is and isn’t prepared to lie to herself in order to find comfort. Perhaps it is you who is at fault to assume the kind of happiness you want is the same kind of happiness she wants or should aim for.
R
R_C
Guest
There is objective meaning and purpose to creation and to life, and there are absolute laws of mathematics, science, and morality meant to keep creation and life in order and lead them to perfection.
What is more, those absolute, universal, timeless laws of mathematics, science, and morality can be learned through reason alone, and their logical soundness can be fully demonstrated - just like the opposite belief can be shown to be irrational or at least not logically sound.
T
tonyrey
Guest
If significance is entirely in the eye of the beholder the significance of your belief is also entirely in the eye of the beholder, i.e. it is insignificant! Relativism is self-destructive…
I agree but if one’s goals, values and principles are arbitrary they are worthless because they amount to no more than wishful thinking.
*Le Mythe de Sisyphe is a classic but both Sartre and Camus were humanists *in spite of their philosophy of absurdity- which is impossible to reconcile with day-to-day life.
R
R_C
Guest
That way of thought is unclear. If misunderstood, can lead to injury. According to one understanding of this idea, for instance, a person with a mental disability or some grave paralysis or a person with a terminal illness has no purpose in life and may as well kill himself. Entire populations that live in the deepest poverty, with no hope other than living and dying in misery and hunger, would have no reason to live. There would be no need to spending billions, or to offer our lives and become missionaries and go live with them and bring some basic help.
What gives meaning to life is life, regardless of any vain purpose or vain goal, because all of those things will pass. In fact, we can clearly show that life is the result of love (and I mean, life as coming from a Creator) and that as a result the one thing that gives true essence to life is love, a love that expresses itself in the search of our Creator (which manifests itself in the search for truth, knowledge, understanding, and in the expression of creativity) an in the love shown towards those who surround us.
I speak of true love here, a love that is unconditional and self-giving. I don’t speak of the kind of selfish “love” that aims at satisfying the senses, for that is in fact the root of all inclinations that injury the person and the society he lives in…inclinations such as the desire to possess, be it power, money, exterior beauty, or sexual pleasure…those things do not give meaning to life, they deprive it of meaning.
That is not to say that the desire to have goals, to accomplish, are not good. They are very good. But not as an end.
As for the set of values and principles, those are already created for us, a perfect, universal, timeless and unchanging set of values and principles whose ultimate goal is to lead men to true joy, true peace, and to fulfill their most intimate, most essential desire to love and be loved, to be part of a family which includes all and excludes nobody, and to be truly, physically and spiritually not servants, not creatures, but the sons and daughters of the living God.
R
R_C
Guest
Ok, my bad
W
WmJackP
Guest
Sorry. I can’t agree. You claim “truth by its nature is absolute”. but that is simply another way of saying that there are absolutes. The word “truth” is a word with whatever assigned meaning we give it. You are simply assigning a quality of “absoluteness” to it.
For example, consider the cartoon character in the wizard of Id who is chained upside down in his cell. Perhaps, he might say “I am free” and from the point of view of his jailers that would be a lie; yet, if he is free in his own mind then it is a “truth”. Consider if he believes that he is serving some purpose–a living example of the defiance of man against the forces of tyranny, for example, then he is freeer than his jailers, in that sense.
Make sense?
- Status