Is there a meaning to life? Or, are we just here?

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

More importantly, do I care? No. I make my own meaning. Some days I have it. Some days I just get up and hit the repeat button for 18 hours.

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You are the place where I find shelter left out in the cold.
You are the Hell in helter skelter

Hmmm, let me answer in accordance with my theology....compoundly:

physically: interaction

biologically: sensation

intellectually: deceifer

theologically: recollection

mystically: atonement

-TC

Meaning & Purpose for the Secular Humanist

“Life’s a bitch, then you die.”

I have long gathered, from believers I've known, that the only true meaning in life, and the purpose for our existence, has been provided for us by a “higher power.” As an atheist (or agnostic, perhaps), I ought to concur with the nihilist view expressed in the opening quotation, yet I do not. But I've also never understood the religious view either. In this essay I hope to show that neither is true.

Created for a Purpose

Imagine that the universe and all it contains was created by an “intelligent designer.” Such a designer would surely have had reasons for such an effort, a purpose for the creation. Mankind, as part of that creation, is unlikely to be able to grasp the fullness of the purpose for it. The best we should hope for is that we can muddle through and get it basically right – that we will fulfill our assigned bit of the overall purpose. But while we live, we can not know for sure whether we have or have not done so.

Believers will tell us we have guides. The Torah, Bible, Qur’an, Vedas – whichever scriptures are believed – contain the plan and purpose for us to read and understand. For the secular, however, if these scriptures are meant to provide guidance, each of them constitutes among the worst instruction manuals ever conceived. Each of them is understood differently by every single reader. The best evidence of this is that proliferation of sects within every faith, based on alternate readings.

Yet even if we were able to discern completely our assigned purpose, that purpose would not be our own, but the designer’s. Consider for a moment the Belgian Blue cattle, bred to be double-muscled to provide more meat per animal. It is unlikely such an animal would be better off knowing for what purpose it was created. Those extra muscles have value for us, their designer, but none for the creature in its own right.

The same must hold true for me. As a creature with a purpose valuable only to another (the designer), I am stripped of value in my own right.

Now, most notions of a purpose given by the major religions are woefully inadequate. That my purpose might be simply to "believe," or to live a blameless life, so that I might be rewarded later for doing so (or punished otherwise), is a pretty weak basis for so great an act of creation. The idea that any god needs human praise, worship or service (God needs domestics?) is just plain silly. That these are what creation is about is simply ludicrous.

Then Why Am I Here?

There are endless answers to that question, all of them external to me, and most of them merely causal. “Because my parents had sex.” “Because Canada paid a ‘baby bonus’.” “Because DNA insists on its own replication.” These are all answers to the question, but don't satisfy. Nothing in those answers provides me with any meaning. There is nothing there to give my existence significance. Even less elevating is the notion that I am nothing more than the end of a long, completely natural and completely arbitrary process. Whoopee for me!

But perhaps, just perhaps, that is all that it is. I have never dogmatically denied the existence of an original creator, creative force or cosmic accident. I don’t know how to understand the “first cause,” or even if there was one. But from that first cause on, there does seem to be sufficient evidence to explain a natural evolution from there-and-then to here-and-now.

So is that it then? Is the nihilism of the opening quote justified? Is there really no purpose or meaning to my existence? What “meaning” can arise from a cosmic accident, or from a long chain of natural, random events? These, too, answer the “why am I here question” in a merely causal sense, but not in a purposive way and thus never satisfy.

A Purpose of My Own

I said earlier that I believe I am the end of a natural but random series of events. This is not quite true. Since the appearance of conscious thought, people have been making choices, and every choice has an impact on what follows. I am who I am, in the world that I know, because early people followed herds; because the barons stood up to King John in 1215; because great thinkers thought; because of untold important and unimportant acts – of kindness or cruelty, hedonism or self-denial, selfishness or altruism. Because of all these and more, my world is what it is. Almost – but not quite – random.

But must that not mean that what follows me, how the world evolves from this very moment on, is to some extent – great or small – affected by me?

Now, at last, I have come to, and can choose, a purpose, a way to achieve a meaningful life that is my own, in my own right. I know that there will be a world post-me, just as I inhabit a world post-Hammurabi, post-Caesar, post-Ghengis Khan and Hitler and Churchill. As they have contributed to the world I know, I will contribute to the world others will know.

What will I do with that? What ultimate mark will my life leave on a world I shall never see, but will help to create?

Could I ask for a greater purpose?

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

This was resolved years ago. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42.

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Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

God's Cosmic Plan

We are Holy One

"I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last."

This verse from Revelation 22:13 went through my mind during my initial Biomystical religious experience at Easter of 1979 and began my vision of God's Cosmic Plan. My first revelation of it can be viewed in the End of the Universe and Key to the Unified Field Theory section of the Original Biomystical Religious Experience pages. More than two decades have past since then with no further "cosmic" revelations. But at the end of August, 2000, the following came to me:

In the Beginning...

Genesis 1:26 "And God (Elohim) said, 'Let Us make man in our image, after our own likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So Elohim created man in Its own image, in the image of Elohim created It him (them); male and female created It them. And Elohim blessed them.."



Teihard de Chardin: "If God were to have a throne anywhere in the universe it would be in the most complex part of it which we presently know is the human brain."


What is the Purpose of Life?

To create God which created the Universe, Life and Humanity to create Itself. God is Humanity far into the future, far into the past, and ever present. God guides Humanity's development towards a Spiritual Climax of becoming God. Humanity in our future may not even look like us. We are primitives in God's past but nonetheless Humanity is made in the image of God. That's why the word means more than just being a human being and expresses God's compassion and loving kindness. That's why we seek guidance and respond to the Call from our Mother-Father, Elohim, to become the humanitarian Good Shepherds of Life in the physical world which is the School of Living for the world beyond the grave. And that is why Life and human societies evolves towards higher states of complexity, to approach and eventually become the vast complexity that is the Holy One of all Creation.

Image the Klein Bottle model of the Universe which is the third step up from the ancients' Ouroboros, the World Serpent eating its tail, then the Mobius Strip, then the Klein Bottle, all archetypes for multidimensional dynamic cyclical closed systems. Time and Space are recycled endlessly from Big Bang to Black Holes and back perfecting God out of Itself. This is the only way God can be thought of as "Unbegotten". But this is only the physical Time-Space continuum and material universe. Beyond the grave there is Somewhere Else, a world of Loving Light that gives the Eternal Model for evolution of the Spirit through Matter.


Spiritual Ecology & the Climax God

There is a Spiritual Ecology system as well as a biological ecology system to Life. The evidence of it are to be found in the movements of spiritual entities and concepts through history. A spiritual climax succession pattern emerges where each new religious vision goes through a series of revisionary changes to arrive at a final form that is stable and self-perpetuating. Within the body of religious beliefs a similar succession of stages emerges where religious belief systems interact with one another, sometimes cooperatively but often competitively to arrive at a final or climax stage where dominant religions, i.e., those with the most followers and material power, are relatively stable and capable of self-perpetuation and lesser religions finding small sociological niches to exist in.

In other words, a spiritual hierarchy is established one way or another, one that is stable through time, at least until the spiritual foundation collapses through old age and deteriorating doctrines proven wrong allowing new dynamic visions to spring up and replace the old climax religious visions with a new set. All of this points to humans viewing a Godhead that is Itself in process of evolving through successions of human recognition stages. But like the natural ecology systems there will be established one way or another a dominant religion in a spiritual hierarchical pattern and that means one spiritual vision of the Godhead will prevail over all others, i.e., a Climax God.