Believers tend to claim that God "uses" people and will send a human to help them. This is how they explain a lack of presence all the time... One may say, "God 'used' my Uncle to get me off alcohol." Why God seems so concerned about appearing to be non-existent that he can't interact directly like he did in the O.T. and has to 'use' other people so it appears he's not involved is a mystery. Perhaps he's "testing faith."
I think God left it up to us to solve, and we get what we ask for. Life that is. I don't think God is trying to be anything. I think he made a disposition not to tell us anything we don't know.
All this does is assert his lack of participation. Why bother? It's an honest question... Never thought of that- excellent point.
One cannot use a concept like "evolution is a blind process" without thereby invoking a contradistinction with a well-known religious doctrine of intelligent design. IOW, atheists such as yourself still rely on reference to theism to get your meanings across. Solipsism and relativism rule, yes. Riiight. You do not exist in all this process of cogitation the results of which you've typed. Just ask any seasoned drug addict and he or she will confirm that the above is not the case. No, one cannot find worth in whatever one wants, even if the desired thing is not a fantasy.
It's a matter of logical consistency. One person can have a purpose in life only if there is an objective purpose to the world that the person lives in. ?? Where did that come from? Strawman. Where did I argue that it does? Again, strawman. I am not going to defend things I never asserted. Same as above. Try living like a robot and see how satisfactory that is ...
These grand displays of humility are quite a source of contentment, aren't they? Some self-castigation - and voila, one immediately feels reinvigorated!
Years of dicussion with you down the drain ... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! No, this forum environment is probably the only kind of place where such questions have some chance of being addressed.
So whom are you arguing against?? Perhaps you've just been hungry and homeless a lot ... You do have such responsibility, if you are to be consistent. Having to think that I am nothing but liquids, solids and gasses. Granted, there is a measure of comfort in nihilism. All those elevated topics that one doesn't have to concern oneself with.
I think that the experience of aloneness has everything to do with a person's outlook on "life, the Universe and everything." And they do so for different reasons. That's almost like saying that people can't get by in life without lying to themselves, to a psychotic extent. (Note that denial is listed as a psychotic psychological defense mechanism.) Where do you get this idea that I am a theist? You must have really low standards for theism if you consider someone like me to be a theist. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
If it is logical. Then one should be able to explain in detail the logic behind it. So please humor me and explain. You have not explained why it is necessary to have a purpose. You only explained under what circumstances you feel purpose can exist. It is called an analogy, a way of somewhat simplifying an idea. Giving it some means of being comprehended by someone who is demonstrating an inability to understand as it was previously explained. Perhaps your OP challenged things that none of us asserted... I can't speak for others but I am sure it is a possibility, and if that is the case should we defend that which we do not assert? Or should we just ignore you. I'm for the latter. These were all ideas presented by the Abrahamic faiths. Not you specifically. But it really would be nice if you would argue one side of the issue rather than bouncing back and forth. Otherwise I will be forced to assume that you don't even know where you stand or what you think and therefore will have to put you on ignore permanently due to your inability to focus and reach a viable conclusion. Bouncing back and forth serves no purpose except to, and I hate to say it because it is the easiest criticism to toss out there but I must, troll. It's sad really. because previously, you did demonstrate the ability to listen and consider another point of view. maybe that was just a short lived burst of abnormality from your normal method of behavior. It's too bad you cannot make that a consistency. I have and it was quite productive. I like productivity. And more often than not I have found emotions can nothing more than an barrier to making wise decisions. They can be fun at times. But like all things, there is a time and place for everything. I would greatly prefer emotions to be kept at a minimum so that TRUE logic can be obtained. Not some faulty logic that is rationalized by how it makes us feel.
Nevermind, wynn, don't bother responding to me. I have you on ignore now. You simply are not worth my time.
That's not true. Just as Satan can tempt without interfering with free will, God can encourage without interfering with free will. I guess it's kind of like a benevolent sort of entrapment. Faced with divinely-engineered circumstance X, you will likely do Y, and if you don't, God will try again. But you could say the same thing about a transcendent benevolent invisible pink unicorn too, and it's evil and almost as influential archenemy.
"Blind" and "merely" look like evaluative words to me. I prefer words like 'non-anthropomorphic' or 'non-teleological'. The circularity consists in initially framing the situation in terms of something important being lacking, then seeming to draw the conclusion that something important is lacking. Maybe. Sometimes people who no longer believe in God do continue to think in distinctively theistic ways. (I've commented elsewhere on the atheist fundies who insist on Biblical literalism and inerrancy.) But is that really what this thread is about? You seem to be insisting that people like myself lack something. You insist that we feel existential angst, misery, "universal loneliness", or whatever you want to call it, BECAUSE we don't believe in God, because we don't imagine that the universe has some grand purpose in which we play a vital and central role, and because we don't imagine that the ruler of the universe is a parent-surrogate who takes a conscious interest in insuring our personal welfare. As others have already pointed out, I think that you are projecting your own theistic feelings and worldview onto us. You are imagining how it would feel for a theist to lack faith, and then projecting that feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness onto us. The flaw in that reasoning is that our happiness, our fulfillment and our sense of meaning isn't dependent on our having faith in some theistic myth. Our happiness may or may not be based on something just as flimsy and ephemeral, but it isn't based on that. In other words, imagining how it would feel for you to lack faith in God doesn't describe how it feels for us to lack faith in God. That's because the concept of God plays a very different role in many of our psychologies than it seemingly plays in the mind of a theist. I think that you are the one who is proposing that false dichotomy. You're the one who is suggesting that if we don't believe in your universal cosmic purpose (God), then we must as a result of that failure to believe also feel hollow and empty inside, as if nothing in our lives has any meaning. My reply is that your conclusion doesn't follow, precisely for the reason you gave, because we invest no end of local things in our lives with purpose and meaning. We perceive purposes and intentions all around us all the time. Our lives are filled with intentions and purposes. What we don't perceive are big-time cosmological purposes, meanings and teleological goals for the entire universe. But (this is the big point) our happiness and sense of completion isn't dependent on that. Actually, just speaking of me, I'm an agnostic regarding the big questions. I don't have a clue what accounts for the universe, why it's here, or even if the word 'why' is meaningful. But I'm reasonably certain that whatever accounts for existence, it isn't a "person" modeled on ourselves, and it may well turn out to be something totally incomprehensible to humans. So whatever the ultimate anwer is, it's well beyond my human pay-grade and it doesn't play any signifcant role in my worldview or in my personal happiness. That's precisely what we're doing. It's what your first post told us that we can't possibly do... because we aren't theists.
Just like the Mona Lisa is nothing but a bunch of paint on a canvas? The Lord of the Rings is nothing but ink on paper? Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Atheism doesn't reject all meaning and purpose, only the kind of universal purpose that would only be the result of a creator. Humanism isn't nihilism.
And by using them, you still evoke the contradistinction with theism, and as such acknowledging your dependence on it. Why on earth would they do that? Clearly, if someone thinks in "distinctively theistic ways" - well, then they simply think in distinctively theistic ways, whatever else they otherwise claim about themselves. If you don't feel that lack, if you don't actually feel and think in "distinctively theistic ways" - then why use a distinctively theistic discourse or one that has distinctively theistic references?? I am comparing the mainstream atheistic discourse with the Pali Canon. How is it that the Pali Canon is in a strictly non-theistic discourse without theistic references? And why is it that the Western atheists (who tend to presume themselves so advanced, so in line with "how things really are") do not produce a discourse like that? Why do Western atheists rely on a distinctively theistic discourse? If that is the case, then why use a distinctively theistic discourse, even as you are atheists? And please, I am not a theist. Have you not read any of my posts here or what? ?
I think you know the answer to this. I don't live with my parents anymore, but I still sometimes act like the kid I once was. A fundamental break from a course of belief does not mean every action based on it instantly (or ever) disappears, to be replaced by something new. Even die-hard non-theists often believe in luck at the card table - despite the fact that luck is inarguably a belief in supernaturally manipulated events.
If this has already been said then I apologize. Why does your ontological position have anything at all to do with your contentedness with existence?
How could it possibly not??? Do explain how one's ontological position and contededness with existence are not related!
