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Meaning
What is the meaning of meaning? I will live my life as I have regardless of what I learn today, for the most part. I may change a few habits, but I still eat and sleep and think. I do a lot of thinking. But whether my life is part of a grand purpose or not doesn't seem to have much effect on daily decisions about which channel to watch, or whether to eat salad with dinner. What meaning there is in my life seems to come from the effect I have on the people with whom I come into contact. I'd like those effects to be positive, from my point of view and theirs. That's enough for me.
Now, if were to learn that my skipping the second doughnut helped Zarkon the Great conquer a neighboring galaxy, and bring them enlightenment in the next millenium, I might sleep better at night.
posted by
mousehop
on August 27, 2008 at 10:24 AM
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kooka_lives - this is another phenomena peculiar to the USA amongst
developed nations and pertaining to religious beliefs.
The anti-evolution camp, which finds its greatest number of proponents amongst fundies, has a number of more or less meaningless objections they adhere to. As you describe in this post, evolution somehow to them makes life meaningless, they also object to the idea of our common ancestry with apes. And then there's the biggie of course; by constructing their own version of the scientific theory of evolution, which envelops a great number of aspects not proposed by the "real theory", they have pitted the most widely used scientific framework in existence against their version of God. It's an "either/or" scenario to them and when it is considered that a scientific theory is dynamic, changing with each new discovery and that religious dogma is not dynamic, we end up with what we are witnessing today:
People that want to impose redundant and backwards religious constructs based on ancient mythologies onto a non compliant modern world and inevitably onto everyone else.
When I read anti evolution blogs written by some of these people, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Instead of lauding Darwin's original hypothesis for the remarkable scientific benchmark that it was in its historical context, routinely they vilify the man.
They have created a new brand of dumb disease and are intent on infecting as much of societies' institutions with it as they possibly can.
posted by
gomedome
on August 27, 2008 at 7:50 AM
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The meaning of life is in this very moment
and not dependant on any conceptual constructs and speculations about the nature of Reality. The kind of God you criticize is not the God of my experience and understanding as I have gained from religious practice and research, nor the God of many religions whilst the Universe you describe is almost that. I admit that I also know people who believe in the kind of God you describe but the religious processes/initiations that were prescribed in many religions were designed in great part to help people overcome such a limited view of Reality and to find meaning in their own lives in the present and their immediate environment without loosing sight of the larger Universe and the effects their current actions can have on the future.
There seems to be a lot of assumptions made about the "created in a moment/over a week" creationists views of God by yourself and other critics of that approach and just as many assumptions about you and natural selection evolution supporters the other way around. Personally I don't stand in either camp, but take evolution and universal intelligence as interdependent and obviously the case.
Meaning in life does not have to rely on some distant goal to be reached some day in the future in some other dimension for those who choose to acknowledge the magnificence of the Universe as they experience it and call it God and recognize it as intelligence of a more encompassing nature than that of any particular being who has its being in God. I think to a large degree my own religious view is only semantically different from yours and mine accommodates that which you argue against, as simply part of the natural way many humans experience and express their lives according to the words and images they know and understand. Don't expect everybody to understand your point of view, some are simply not willing and/or able.
posted by
AardigeAfrikaner
on August 27, 2008 at 12:18 AM
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even if I was not planned!
posted by
RITE2SPIN
on August 26, 2008 at 9:02 PM
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