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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 Richard Goscicki on August 19, 2012 at 11:16am

Jonathan, Any kind of social commitment contradicts freedom.

That goes without saying, but I'd use "limits" freedom rather than contradicts.

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Permalink Reply by Alan Carter on August 19, 2012 at 2:33pm

Anarchy ..law of the jungle ??

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Allan H. Clark on August 19, 2012 at 12:14pm

"It is with government as with medicine. Its only business is the choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty."

—Jeremy Bentham

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Permalink Reply by Alan Carter on August 19, 2012 at 2:30pm

Nonsense

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Allan H. Clark on August 19, 2012 at 2:53pm

Whatever you believe, you need to make your case against Bentham's statement. Invective is not argument.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 20, 2012 at 12:31am

Jonathan, you appear to define "true believer" as a person not motivated by expectation of a reward. It seems an idiosyncratic definition.

I see the words of the rest of your post but don't see a connection between what I wrote and your analogies.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Chang on August 20, 2012 at 3:47am

That's the way it is defined by the religion itself as far as I understand. People who motivated by a reward instead of "God's love" (or righteousness, even if it is according to the ethics described by the Bible) cannot be true believers. It may seem idiosyncratic because you see religion as necessarily evil, not only in practical effect but in inherent purpose.

This leads us into my analogies. The only way religion makes its "believers" (or shall we say non-believers?) unhappy is the rules that it defines. These are rules not dissimilar to laws or other cultural, familial commitments.

If I've misunderstood you, please expand on why exactly you think religion must make people unhappy?

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Permalink Reply by Alan Carter on August 19, 2012 at 2:27pm

Pleasure depends what u mean pleasure ...tiddlywinks ..golf ..snap.. shooting defenceless animals for fun

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Permalink Reply by Alan Carter on August 19, 2012 at 2:37pm

Rubbish .. choice .. a way of life some with heaven in mind

those without belief much the same moral choices every day

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Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 19, 2012 at 4:51pm

Pleasure is a reasonable choice for life's purpose. Sexual pleasure is a reasonable choice of pleasure.

Augustine famously prayed for chastity, and more famously added, "but not yet."

Why were so many "fathers of Catholicism" sexually repressed?

I suggest post-traumatic stress.

My reason?

The author of a book whose title I recall as "Achilles in Viet Nam" asserted that many of the ancient Greeks whose names we know had fought in the wars of their times and exhibited symptoms of what we know as PTSD. Their heightened alertness, the mildest symptom of PTSD, resulted in their turning to literature or philosophy as a means of self-therapy.

Wars and other kinds of trauma continued, and in later centuries PTSD sufferers turned to a kind of drug: fantasizing happiness in another life.

PTSD might have caused religion. It might also have caused sexual repression.

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Permalink Reply by Alan Carter on August 19, 2012 at 5:02pm

Repressed priests exploited women you are fixated with sex porn my son twists the mind

cold shower is needed or as they do with dogs... spayed man in your case

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Permalink Reply by Richard Goscicki on August 20, 2012 at 7:12am

Anyone who would like to study the painting of the Auto da fé of St. Dominic I posted earlier can click here. Just click on the painting and it you can see it in amazing detail.

I find this picture shocking as well as remarkable. What’s especially striking (and sick) is the fat cleric directly below St. Dominic dosing off as if he were at a boring opera. It shows how routine these horrible murders were.

I still find it disturbing to think there’s a New World island country named after this guy. He must have been a 15^th century Tom Dewey who gained national attention by prosecuting criminals. The only different is the Cathars weren’t mobsters but good people who didn’t want to pay homage to the pope.