With Or Without God

[lewisnotmiller]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

I've often wondered the same thing.
Often (not always) the answer I have received is something related to eternal life. It makes my brain ache to think how a temporary life can have no value, but extrapolating this out to permanence suddenly adds meaning.

Meaning seems to be what we bring to it, regardless of our theistic (un)beliefs.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

Ah, nihilism.

 

[Rival]

Ah, nihilism.

It is, and I make no objection to it.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

It is, and I make no objection to it.

You might be interested in this thread: http://www.religiousforums.com/threads/nihilism-and-right-wing-politics.187544/

 

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning?

I feel the same way. People act like God gives us meaning, but I get the feeling we're going to meet up with God one day and He'll be all like, "Uh ... oh yeah, forgot that planet was still on. My bad."

Whatever humans are supposed to do that will ultimately lead to some ultimate goal. Bees make honey, worms help the soil, trees give oxygen, humans...?

Genesis has us being park maintenance: cataloguing plants and animals, picking up poop, etc.

we can do nothing.

"You can be more" -- John Crichton, Farscape

I feel it's like Jesus' parable of the talents: everybody started off with one coin. You are rewarded or punished based on what you put into it or took out of it. Despite claims of grace and such, Jesus seems to have a fairly consistent view that Garbage-In,Garbage-Out.

If the honey bee went extinct and we had no more honey, life would go on after all.

As they are severely needed pollinators, our lives may go on but we're still going to be royally screwed.

Dogs make me smile, they also fertilize the lawn, which is their "purpose?"

Well, we domesticated them to help and cheer us. We didn't domesticate them just for fertilizer.

why do we need to spread the joy to others to begin with?

If you are selfless, it should be to lift people up anyway. If you are selfish, helping others can be helpful to you. The rich man in Jesus' parable didn't feed the poor guy or give him a job. Even from a selfish perspective, it's bad PR to have homeless people starving on your doorstep and it's more profitable to invest in said individual to be a productive member of society, which will make you richer.

why do we need to be remembered by people after we die?

We don't. We WANT it. We don't NEED it.

why do we need to be a good person? what for?

Again, there are both selfless and selfish reasons for being compassionate. Whatever floats your boat. Let God whine about motive. I only care if the job is done.

 

[Etritonakin]

Meaning is not necessarily the thing to consider. Reason and advantage should be considered.

The only possible reason for or advantage to living is that living is awesome.

However, it is only awesome if you do it right -and how to do it right is inherent overall -and specific depending on circumstance.

Considering this life is like considering a project half-complete -and we are the project.

We live long enough to get the general idea -and our materials are recycled.

Many people have been produced in a limited space with limited resources -and our ability to affect things has been controlled.

This is in preparation for being given more ability to affect things when we will not affect them adversely.

Why? Because it is going to be awesome.

The things which make this life less than awesome are ignorance, evil intent, vulnerability, disorder, etc... All of those issues will be addressed -and all negative things nullified.

The present situation also prepares us to accept that which will address those issues and no longer reject such -that being God and choosing to eat from the tree of life.

The fruit of of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil includes experiencing the decay and corruption of the creation -which must be maintained.

That maintenance requires God -and obedience to his righteous government -which is righteous because it maintains good for all.

One might ask why God didn't just make things perfect in the first place.
The answer is that this is the first place -and that is what he is doing.
Making more like himself requires a process -and our involvement, choice, will, etc. It cannot simply be done by fiat.

 

[idav]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

With god or gods being in the picture the idea would be that there would be some sort of reason life was created or came about. A sort of direction everything is going which can't be there without a god.

Whatever humans are supposed to do that will ultimately lead to some ultimate goal. Bees make honey, worms help the soil, trees give oxygen, humans...?

Theres a difference there when your asking if life has meaning vs whether being human has any meaning or purpose. A god, I presume would be the reason for life even existing but may not necessarily be concerned for any particular species.

 

[LuisDantas]

Ah, nihilism.

Is that nihilism? I thought of nihilism as something different.

 

[LuisDantas]

If you are selfless, it should be to lift people up anyway. If you are selfish, helping others can be helpful to you. The rich man in Jesus' parable didn't feed the poor guy or give him a job. Even from a selfish perspective, it's bad PR to have homeless people starving on your doorstep and it's more profitable to invest in said individual to be a productive member of society, which will make you richer.

Beyond that, it is simply wise and prudent not to allow joy to be too concentrated. Wide disparity tends to originate jealousness and misery, which are far more likely to come back to us and create all sort of problems than they are not.

And also, of course, there is the plain fact that the alternatives to spreading joy are being unable to and being unwilling to. Neither is really advisable or auspicious in and of themselves.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Is that nihilism? I thought of nihilism as something different.

Existential nihilism, yes.

 

[LuisDantas]

Existential nihilism, yes.

Such a dramatic name for such a reasonable stance...

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Such a dramatic name for such a reasonable stance...

It's just the proper philosophical name for it.

 

[RationalSkeptic]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

Usually because most belief in a deity comes from organized religions whom have specific goals for people to try to achieve.

 

[idea]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

The meaning of life? In order to mean something - you have to mean something to someone else. We don't make ourselves important, but we are important to our mother, to our father, and we are important to our heavenly Parents too - we are engraven on the palms of our older brother's hands - we are loved, cared about, this is where our worth comes from...

 

[Milton Platt]

Order is the meaning. Even if life is 'merely' adding dimensions of entertainment such as eating & sleeping, there appears an order that provides comfort.

Perhaps for a fortunate few who live in a well developed country with relative wealth, medical system, plenty of food and clean water.......but for many millions.....not so..

 

[Burl]

Yes; Order is an assumption of categories: In a "Do as you would be done by" world, who belongs where?

 

[Windwalker]

Whatever humans are supposed to do that will ultimately lead to some ultimate goal. Bees make honey, worms help the soil, trees give oxygen, humans...?

You're asking what is the inherent purpose of humans? I'm not sure you could say that about anything, including bees and worms and trees inherent function. Those are all products of their being in the form they are which becomes parts of a system with inherent meaning to others in the system itself. Think in terms of ecology. To answer the question what is contribution of humans to the whole, what do they bring and where does "God" fit into that?

I would say all of it is God. Even the bees making honey do so "in God". When it comes to humans, our level of conscious awareness will largely dictate how happy and creative we can be, or how shut off and withdrawn from life we are. I would say the more in-touch we are with "God", in the sense of that energetic Life that is in all things, the happier we are, the more creative we are, the freer we are to simply "be" what we are in all our inherent potentials which emerge in us through that "faith" in Life. One doesn't have to put a theological wrapper around that and give it the name of a deity for it be considered God. In fact doing so diminishes it quite often, taking the metaphor of Life and making it a descriptor of some object outside of it.

What I am saying is that those who are open to life, live within God - be those theists or atheists in name. Those who live in self-contraction cut themselves off from that creative flow that is in fact inherent in all of life. Our purpose, all our purpose from the bee to the worm to the human being is to be and become, to create, to love. Our purpose is to live and be alive in all its aspects.

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

~Jiddu Krishnamurti​

 

[Windwalker]

Humans strike me as the great storytellers. That characterizes our nature far more than supposed reason and rationality. Humans tell stories about how things are that are not how things are. Other animals probably do it too, but we can't communicate with them well enough to know their stories.

Nice! I like this a lot. We are masters of metaphor, and we ride them to the realization of our own inherent potentials as creators of truth and reality. A lack of imagination, a purely "factual" mind is actually the opposite of that. It reduces us to little more than just eating-machines rather than explorers of Life.

 

[MD]

I am a theist, I believe in a God. I believe he created the universe and so on. But I still don't believe that life has any inherent meaning. Why should there being a God all of a sudden give life meaning? I see this argument a lot, directed at Atheists, of how can life have any meaning without God, or some form of this argument. I am asking, why does God or Gods give life meaning? I'm not interested in afterlife (which I am personally ambivalent about) or such things. My belief is, God or no, life has no ultimate, inherent meaning or value. We all end up dead and dust, and there probably is no afterlife in my opinion (and even if there were, it still wouldn't give this life meaning).

So, how does God or Gods give life inherent meaning?

As Zoroastrians we believe that we have to work towards building Asha with the universal force of goodness aka Ahura Mazda. We create our own meaning in all of this but there is an end purpose.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

The concept of a Supreme Being that most accurately reflects reality and how the Cosmos functions, imo, is the Goddess Kali. She's the reconciliation of all dualities. She's horrific, frightening, full of blood, gore, death, decay, suffering, etc. and She even delights in those things, but there is also beauty and a sort of peace that comes with accepting reality as it is and not how our limited ape minds wish it to be. There is no real purpose to it all, it just is and it will always be that way. There's nothing we can do to change it on any grand scale and we'll all end up being consumed by Her, as She will devour the entire universe (and then spit it back out, possibly in a different form). We're just experiencing it. It's like an amusement park, imo. Just going along for the ride.

Life is absurd.

"Every single day, every nine to five
Everybody works it hard, but then we finally die
And there's no remorse, or the slightest sound
We're forever cool with the way it all breaks up and down

Let's start a riot
Nobody's right
Nobody's wrong
Life's just a game
It's just one epic holiday
However far this
Takes us along
Take us away
It's just one epic holiday"