We cannot –and don’t want to– sake off our fancies and our follies, believers and atheists alike.
The Promise and the Atheist’s toil
The promise of afterlife or eternal life answers the need for perservation. We do not want to stop existing; we can’t accept that our Selves are going to perish. Moreover the afterlife-belief serves the true believer in another, even more essential, way. It gives to her/his life a meaning, because if there is a better, eternal life after death, then this earthly existence is a pathway, not a stalemate. It leads to something bigger. It has a Meaning.
The great majority of atheists around the world struggle to find a “secular meaning” for their lives. Happily, delusions, self-deceptions and all kinds of distractions – albeit of a different kind than those of the believers – are available to help them endure life. Most atheists, like religious people, live their lives as things and ideas have value and an inherent meaning when there can’t be any. Most of the time they distract themselves from their insignificance and in this way they often succeed in enjoying life, despite the fact that they do not have the same easiness to entertain their fancies as the believers have. If we ask an avowed atheist about it in a moment when (s)he has temporarily suspended her/his self-deceptions and distractions, we can imagine the answer:
“Nothing really has meaning, purpose or a built-in value. The life of a single human, the life of a species (homo sapiens), the planet Earth, all these nice things are not even a drop in the ocean in the spatial and temporal scales of the known Cosmos. Everything is not just going to disappear; it is going to be completely forgotten, eliminated from the book of the universe. The destruction of a tiny, stony planet in the corner of a trivial galaxy is a usual phenomenon in the cosmic edifice.” But soon this fleeting moment of clarity will give place again to the soothing delusions. Things get value, ideas get importance. We need them to calm our hearts, that ‘s why we cannot – and don’t want to – sake off our fancies and our follies, believers and atheists alike. Who can blame us for that?
(By philosophientist found in https://philosophience.wordpress.com/2020/10/03/contemplations-iv-the-promise-and-the-atheists-toil/ )
The promise of afterlife or eternal life answers the need for perservation. We do not want to stop existing; we can’t accept that our Selves are going to perish. Moreover the afterlife-belief serves the true believer in another, even more essential, way. It gives to her/his life a meaning, because if there is a better, eternal life after death, then this earthly existence is a pathway, not a stalemate. It leads to something bigger. It has a Meaning.
The great majority of atheists around the world struggle to find a “secular meaning” for their lives. Happily, delusions, self-deceptions and all kinds of distractions – albeit of a different kind than those of the believers – are available to help them endure life. Most atheists, like religious people, live their lives as things and ideas have value and an inherent meaning when there can’t be any. Most of the time they distract themselves from their insignificance and in this way they often succeed in enjoying life, despite the fact that they do not have the same easiness to entertain their fancies as the believers have. If we ask an avowed atheist about it in a moment when (s)he has temporarily suspended her/his self-deceptions and distractions, we can imagine the answer:
“Nothing really has meaning, purpose or a built-in value. The life of a single human, the life of a species (homo sapiens), the planet Earth, all these nice things are not even a drop in the ocean in the spatial and temporal scales of the known Cosmos. Everything is not just going to disappear; it is going to be completely forgotten, eliminated from the book of the universe. The destruction of a tiny, stony planet in the corner of a trivial galaxy is a usual phenomenon in the cosmic edifice.” But soon this fleeting moment of clarity will give place again to the soothing delusions. Things get value, ideas get importance. We need them to calm our hearts, that ‘s why we cannot – and don’t want to – sake off our fancies and our follies, believers and atheists alike. Who can blame us for that?
(By philosophientist found in https://philosophience.wordpress.com/2020/10/03/contemplations-iv-the-promise-and-the-atheists-toil/ )
Comments (3)
This is not evidence based, but preaching. You do not know this. Perhaps a better way to address this would be to find specific things that give atheists meaning in their lives, then evaluate those answers.
I'll volunteer. I find meaning in my continual existence. In getting up in the morning and grinding fresh bean coffee. In thinking about things. Playing some video games. Solving coding puzzles at work. I find meaning in discussing questions like this. =)
I enjoy living for its own sake. I want to ask you something. If there is an afterlife, will you enjoy it for its own sake? Will it not have meaning when you reach it, as you then know there is nothing beyond it?
Further, did not God make this world? Did God not make it good? Have you ever thought that not getting meaning in living in God's creation today is an insult to God's creation? I don't mean this snide, but genuine questions to think about. Cannot the atheist enjoy God's creation, even if the atheist doesn't know about that God? Would God not be pleased by that?
That might well introduce some peculiar kind of meaning to the believing mind, although it's not in any sense shown here. But what you're talking about completely subtracts what an atheist would consider meaning, which is precisely given by life's finitude. We have to do things today or tomorrow because there's no eternity to do them forever later. Things matter, everything counts because there's only so much time and nothing lasts.
Quoting philosophience wordpress com
This is a great example of how bad ideology always yields bad answers. You cannot have derived this empirically. There's no evidence that atheist artists are less artistically fulfilled than religious artists, that atheist philanthropists are less passionate than religious ones, etc. This sort of thinking is an initio and evidence-independent.