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As An Atheist Can Your Life Have Purpose and Meaning?

I was wondering what other people thought about this.

I realize we weren't born with a purpose. No creator or "higher calling".

But as a non believer can your life have meaning and purpose without god?

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chuck Boyer on July 13, 2012 at 12:25pm

Good point, Pandora ... To "live" lives free from religious tyranny allows for their fullest expression and (potentially) garners greatest meaning. So my response is yes, life can be the meaning, and living our lives, truly living them, contributes to them enormously. Tho I speak from my own experience, I'm fairly sure many others experience similar.

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Permalink Reply by PandoraBoxe on July 13, 2012 at 3:56pm

Thanx Chuck. I kinda think it's the simplest way to look at it.

Life is the point!

;-}

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Permalink Reply by bobh on July 13, 2012 at 10:56am

My purpose in life is to get my two kids through college. To read as many good books as possible. To oppose war. To warn people about our catastrophic environmental deterioration. to enjoy as many excellent beers as possible..in moderation of course. I dont need religion for any of this.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Goscicki on July 13, 2012 at 11:36am

Bobh, Excellent. Your raison d'etre and my own overlap greatly. My only addition would be the contributions to happiness of the fairer sex.

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Permalink Reply by Glen Rosenberg on July 13, 2012 at 11:08am

Alan, based on what I have read the earliest christians were into drugs big time. And religions predating christianity likewise.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Goscicki on July 13, 2012 at 12:38pm

Glen, it goes back a lot further than the early Christians. I’ve done much research on this subject in preparation for Mirror Reversal. Just as I recently wrote that fundamentalists have a hard time accepting that we evolved from apes, the human genome makes it evident we evolved from viruses. As far as drugs go, our early hominid stages were mushroom eaters—hence enthusiasts of psilocybin.

Since around 1990, I’ve been a big fan of Terence McKenna, a great man who, like Carl Sagan and Chris Hitchens, was taken from us way too early. My “atheist novel” is dedicated to him and he is even a character in the story. Anyone who is interested in this tread on teleology and evolutionary biology, should consider watching one of Terence’s videos for an enlightening experience.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on July 14, 2012 at 1:08am

"...we evolved from apes...."

I regularly tell fundamentalists that we humans and today's apes evolved from a common ancestor.

We and today's viruses also have common ancestors, but these ancestors are billions of years older.

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Permalink Reply by Glen Rosenberg on July 13, 2012 at 12:53pm

Richard, anything to promote escape from our routine. Diana Agorio, an author and contributor to this site, writes about drug use of early christians and prechristian faiths. Some wild shit.

Also about sacrifice and homosexual practices that were considered "out there" by the romans. The hypocrisy of it all is comical.

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Permalink Reply by P.J. Simons on July 13, 2012 at 2:48pm

I've have read widely and deeply in history, mythology, and philosophy. I keep coming back to the extistentialists. Life has the meaning we give it. I think this is true regardless of whether you try to think things through on your own or you buy into an elaborate social construct like religion and let others do your thinking for you. In either case, humans are attempting to give their life meaning.

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Permalink Reply by Jedi Wanderer on July 13, 2012 at 6:39pm

Amen!

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Permalink Reply by Alan Perlman on July 13, 2012 at 4:46pm

Reply to Glen...I don't doubt it. There's a very powerful hallucinogen that grows in the Middle East - probably the source of many a prophetic vision. But what happened? They wanted their rituals to be the only path to a psychedelic experience?

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Permalink Reply by Richard Goscicki on July 14, 2012 at 12:40pm

Write4u, we can see your statement, “Native americans used peyote and mescaline for centuries in their rituals”, is true in the speech of Chief Seattle’s before congress in 1854. If anyone is unfamiliar, it’s worth your time. Brings out our connection with the planet.

What a sad irony that his people had it right all the time and had to suffer at the hands of the opportunistic invaders.

He states a thesis of mine that I’ve written about for decades. “If all the beasts were gone mankind would suffer from a great loneliness of spirit.” I’ve recently written elsewhere on these pages, there are only 264 species of monkey left. If the gorilla goes extinct, people will hate one another even more than now.

It’s been my Lament of Tieresias. I predicted it but can’t do anything about it.