A “creator God” as depicted by any major religion I ever heard of is far more likely to be fiction rather than non fiction under even the most cursory examination, to such a stunning extent, that further verification that it is fiction or not is a waste of time.
Your soul as people commonly refer such concepts, is the “fake reality” created by the functions of the human brain.
Love is first a reproductive drive, and second a need for trusted/safe companionship.
Am I the only one who is confused as hell by reading this entire post?
and I can understand most people. But this just comes off the wall.
You just lost me.
All religions, except for Buddhism, CLAIM that their gods are real without any strong evidence to support they exist.
That’s would be a CLAIM made by people without any evidence.
You’re not making any sense.
It’s hard to agree or disagree when you’re being vague as fuck. Are you just trying to point out that you’re an atheist and that’s it? Because that’s all you really had to say rather than write all of that.
Why is everything the way it is? mass attracts mass.
How did this happen? Space is infinite, anything is possible.
Meaning of life? There is none.
Agreed, they make all kinds of claims, with zero actual evidence of their claims of god. I go further to say further investigation on the reality of the various god concepts is a waste of time.
Correct. Just like the god concepts it is all theory. I am asking if that theory has any holes in it besides the fact that it is just a theory. I so far have found none.
What is love? Primarily it is a reproductive drive, another major component is our need for companionship from the safety and comfort it provides.
I am sorry it came off vague, I tried to keep it short and to the point.
I am an atheist, I filled out the form stating as such and it is in my profile, but I can label myself as an atheist if you think it would help avoid further confusion.
No, that’s a misconception. There is meaning to life but that meaning is personalized to each and every individual.
We don’t all share a universal meaning as religious people would otherwise try to make us believe e.g. going to heaven because this life is temporary. No, that’s bullshit.
We create our own meaning of life. We’re marbles of stone out of which we carve ourselves, what we carve into is our choice.
Yes, no such evidence has ever been revealed to suggest the existence of god. I do consider it a waste of time for me to personally research about it everyday.
When an evidence comes forth, I’m sure the whole world will know. It will be the biggest scientific discovery in the history of mankind.
For me, it’s the other way around. Love is not about reproducing little versions of yourselves and releasing them into the world. It’s about finding someone who cares about you, shares your sorrows and happy moments, becomes a shoulder for you to cry on and is always by your side. Sex is the second most important thing in a relationship.
On this we can agree. People ascribe meaning to life. People have always done this. Take for example the ignorant slobs of our past who once belived in fictional creator gods and had the goal of pleasing those gods to make their lives better. My guess is that it was easier to try and please the imagined gods, through prayer and offerings, that it was to study, work, educate yourself, improve and create your own meaning.
One aspect of "love’ is certainly reproductive drive. I think there is a whole lot more to it and it may even be responsible for our very existence. The human ability to bond is certainly responsible for our survival as a species. Without it we probably would have gone the way of the other 8 species of humanoids. Our ability to bond / love has served us well.
Meaning is what you bring to life, not someting you get from it. Even if you derrive meaning from the imagined service to a God, it is a meaning you are bringing to your existence and not something you are getting from that existence.
I concur with your premises, we can create our own meanings of life. However, I reiterate there is no “actual” meaning to life.
I have created my own meaning to life, but I am also aware it has no bearing on actual reality, instead my meaning is only my own created reality and this meaning is subject to no rules and can be amended at anytime and will be lost when brain death occurs.
I was discussing what love is in reality, not what love is in the reality we create. Anyone can make love mean anything within their own reality, however confusion is likely to occur if we stray from commonly accepted definitions when describing what love is to a personal reality.
In actual reality I conclude that love foremost is part of the process to motivate us to reproduce, a very important step in the continuation of the life cycle for humans. Then secondarily in importance the love is the need for companionship, safety/strength in numbers, and so on.
Me personally, I am similar to you Seek3R, I find companionship side of things far more important in my own reality then reproducing. And the fact we now have a lot of control over the first part in reality to be very “freeing.”
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.
In a sense, OP is right here. Nature didn’t “create” life, it just is there as an emergent property of complicated chemistry and physics(*). Nature does not have a goal with life. Nature does not care a shit about life. There is no natural purpose or meaning behind life. What an individual living being attributes to the concept of life is quite another matter.
(*) The hypothesis is, as far as I can tell, that life started due to self-organisation in organic chemical components. Such self-organisation can occur under favourable conditions and with a flow of energy through the system and with a quality/entropy difference in the input energy flow vs the output energy flow. At some point, there was probably some energetic advantage to molecules that were complicated enough to self-replicate. And thus these self-replicating entities multiplied and those more efficient than others in self-replication won out.
I think it likely your above words played a large role in the formation of religion.
I also speculate that is likely that people found that: manipulating other people’s fears with an all powerful all knowing being that is not them, but communicates through them, to be a highly effective way to successfully manipulate other humans.
Yes, I agree that: love is more complex then the two major driving forces I listed. It seems to be a pretty simple concept that without the drive to reproduce none of us would be here today.
There is a clear advantage to two or more individuals working together in effort towards the same goal over individual effort.
I do not think anyone can bring anything to life, including meaning in actual reality. We can create our own meaning of our own lives for ourselves in our own created realities. But we cannot bring meaning or anything else to the reality we define as “life.”
I am guessing this is similar in essence to what you wrote but worded differently, please let me know if I interpreted your words wrong.
And why exactly are we obsessing about life not having any meaning?
Are you planning on committing suicide?
These are things I’ve heard people who are suffering from depression talk about. Sure. We live and one day we die. So be it. That’s enough for me. Christianity did not make me feel like I had a purpose in life at all and even when I was forced to be a Christian, I didn’t give a shit about who God and Jesus was. It wasn’t a god I wanted to serve.
Serving the biblical god in Heaven would have been pure hell for me and no I don’t believe it exists. I think it’s bullshit. Who wants to sing, bow, and scrape to an imaginary deity for eternity? That’s not living. That’s bondage and mental torture.
I often wonder why most Christians believe in the bullshit that the Bible preaches. It’s absolute bull shit from the Old Testament and all the way to the New Testament. No wonder why they’re all miserable. I know I was.
Like David Killian says
The biblical god is a psychopathic insecure homicidal monster who commits genocide, tortures innocent children, and unleashes horror and suffering on mankind.
According to the bible this god is all-powerful and all-knowing, created this universe and is thus responsible for everything that has happened.
Make your own purpose in life. Be who you want to be. Live how you want to live. Don’t listen to the snot nosed Christians and their fucked up beliefs. Don’t listen to anyone who has a religion. It’ll just make you miserable.
I am not sure I can answer that, I do not consider myself to be obsessing about life not having meaning. To me the conclusion I reached allows the issue to rest, the opposite of obsession. I did ask in my title what I got wrong. So far it appears that it is my ability to communicate my thoughts in a way that others can understand what I am trying to say.
I am not planning on committing suicide. But I do understand some people find this concept to be depressing, but I do not fully understand why. For myself, it does the opposite, I consider my own life to be very finite and that it can end at anytime, even when making sustained and considerable effort to avoid death and major injury.
I wonder this as well. My experiences with these people have led me to a few conclusions that seems to fit fairly well but does not fully answer the question for me:
Abuse of misunderstood personal fears
It is the only thing they know
Successful religious concepts have robust resistance to outside manipulation including actual reality.
Loss of community/family/friends
Plus more - let me know if further discussion is wanted here.
I agree with the quote if we swap out the word “god” for humans. There is no god w/o humans to imagine it forth in their personal realities.
Certainly agree that the biblical god depicted - by humans - in these religions can be accurately described as such. And especially the actions of some humans doing activity in the name of said gods.
Humanity has been by far the largest threat to humanity for several millennia now.
Mass only attracts under one working model of gravity. Even this idea has a fundamental drawback. If you go to the very center of the earth for example. There is now more mass on the outside of this center than on the inside. How is it that the mass does not pull away from the center. *Just something I remember hearing that I thought was interesting." Point being “Einstein also has a theory of gravity.”
Space is infinite? Says who? How would they possibly know? The observable universe has a edge beyond which we can not see, however, as light begins to reach us from distant galaxies our vision expands. Furthermore; as the universe itself is expanding, one needs to ask the question, “expanding into what?”
Not sure that either of these debatable assertions is something to base further hypothesis on.
Hmm… First - this is your definition of a soul. Not a theological one. Ergo, arguing from this position is a Strawman. (With that said, I happen to agree. Experiencing what people call the “soul” is in fact a brain state.) Where we differentiate is in the fact that I can experience this brain state at will. I don’t call it a soul but suspect it is what many people do call a soul and could quite possibly be where the idea of “soul” came from. This is connected to NDE and OBE but we need not go there. Point is, what you are calling “not real” is what I would simply call a “brain state.”
None of this says anything at all about a creator god and when you get right down to it, it also says nothing about an specific theist’s version of a soul. Can we really say anything at all about either concept and still sound rational? How do you know the soul is a “fake reality” An oxymoron if ever I heard one.
Won’t comment on the physics because I’m an atheist, nota cosmologist or a physicist.
I don’t believe there is a meaning in the Not in the sense usually used by theists. Best I’ve been able to come up with is that the meaning of life is itself. To survive and endlessly replicate in its many forms, not just in the sense of human life. I’m unable to believe we’re special.
When I was 20, I was love and thought I knew all about it. Fortunately for both of us, we did not marry. Since then I’ve been in love twice more and married once. (not to either love)
Today at age 73, I don’t understand love at all. I think the romantic and courtly love of twelfth century Troubadours (earlier in India) and popular music is crock. It’s innately selfish and seems to always have been a means to an end. IE a man getting into a woman’s pants.
Altruistic love? I guess it exists, but I’ve never seen it as far as I know.
Love as a function of reproduction? Absolutely. The urge to reproduce is I think our most powerful instinct after survival.
All I can say from experience is that each of those I have loved had feet of clay. By that I mean I built fantasies which were never capable of becoming real.
So at the end of it, I really have no idea about what love is, although I have some ideas about what it is not.
I will spend some time reading up on other working models of gravity I was unaware that there were other working models of gravity, this is precisely the sort of stuff I am looking for to further my knowledge.
Have not considered that before, I thought this was accounted for. I will read up on this as well.
That is my theory.
Says me.
I doubt I or anyone could ever prove/evidence this eithir way. To me an infinite space fits a lot better then a finite one. Space has boundaries and just stops somewhere? After that there is absolute nothing for infinity? I feel that is the greater claim then space is infinite. To boot, space being infinite neatly answers the “how?”
I do agree it is dangerous to base further hypothesis on these ideas, but I feel we are left with no choice when seeking answers to what cannot be observed.
I am out of time for additional response today, but I enjoy this discussion and will pick up where I left off tomorrow.
How does something expand into absolute nothing? How does absolute nothing exist. If it exists, it exists as something. There is a problem here. Absolute nothing exists without existing? Really?
Are you talking about gravity? If so, then say gravity and explain your point.
How did what happen?
I’m dubious, please demonstrate some objective evidence for your conclusion.
I don’t believe there is any overarching meaning to life, however if you make a claim, that claim carries a burden of proof. Can you demonstrate sufficient objective evidence for your claim?
Indeed, as of course do you.
On the contrary I think challenging bad ideas and beliefs, especially where they are pernicious, is important.
The confusion had nothing to do with you being an atheist. You just need to be more specific about what you’re asking, and remember that atheism is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, and not a contrary claim to theism. Though of course one can make such claims, and still remain an atheist, but you’d have the same burden of proof as theists.
For myself, I was special and “lucky” (born into the truth), then I was a Noah-like figure. Each theist comes here with their found true “truth”. Each is special. Each has a relationship with god that the vast others do not have. Each get a reward for their “specialness”.
The realization that we are not is a letting go of ego and being “right” and the loss of future reward as the individual joins the mass of others they judged wrong.
It is also an important part of accepting humanity - other humans - as they have always reflected back to you the parts you have failed to recognize or accept in yourself.
the why