there must be more to life than this
When I’m a little bored of lurking round random spots, one of my favourite places to revisit is any old post by John Zande. If you don’t have the Superstitious Naked Ape on your reader, I would recommend doing so. If you do, I would recommend dipping in and out of his posts to see how the comment discussions progress. Because unlike many other blogs, the fun doesn’t stop on publication day.
John’s latest post is a humdinger. In Death Cult Christianity we are treated to an astounding list of Christian leaders who were salivating for the second coming of their man-god and the accompanying armageddon, all wrapped up in an linguistic nugget of entertainment gold. But, as always, the fun continues down below. If you can navigate your way past some of the more sycophantic comments from JZ’s mindless admirers, there are always interesting divergences and a selection of chatty Christians, eager to defend their faith from fact and evidence.
Here’s my favourite from this post:
But tell me, do you believe in no God whatsoever? Forget for a moment the Christian God. Think of all of the improbable and infinite accidents that had to happen exactly right from the big bang until now for you to exist as an aware thinking being. Do you believe that no greater intelligence directed those events? Do you not even believe in good luck? No rabbit’s foot for you. Is your existence a series of random historical events? Then when you leave this physical plane there really was no point to your life.
Part of me thinks this is a ridiculous comment, but I have to concede that this is huge problem for all of us humans. Personally, I am now reconciled to the fact that ultimately there is no point to my life, beyond that it is something that I get to experience, and perhaps I’ll impact on a handful of lives of other beings who have to experience it as well. But it would be disingenuous of me to pretend there isn’t a part of me that hopes there is more to life than this. However, it’s the part of me that hopes that I have magic powers and the part of me that hopes that dragons really do exist. My innate desire for more to life in the form of invisible, untapped powers, mythical creatures or eternal life, doesn’t for one second mean that any of this exists. And it certainly doesn’t mean I’ll believe in any of the many man-made superstitions or organised religions that have developed in our world – because, just like my magical powers and dragons, there’s no evidence they actually exist.
In the spirit of preparing ourselves for realistic events, I think it’s important that we all mentally accept that there really is no evidence to suggest that life has any meaning beyond what we see. Then when we realise that bits of our body might be in trees or birds when we die, it’s really rather comforting. Much nicer than the idea of an eternity worshipping a god who once drowned its entire creation in a fit of pique.
Oh, you glorious thing, I do so love the compliments! Nice photo, BTW… Pictland’s looking lovely these days.
Here’s how I worded this whole death thing a long while ago in another universe:
“Since man became what we consider “man” some 6,600 generations ago roughly 17 billion unique human beings have been born, walked the earth, and have subsequently died. 17 billion and not one of those 17 billion have ever returned to the earth or managed to get some message back to our biosphere to confirm the existence of some ethereal netherworld beyond…. 17,000,000,000 to Zero are terribly long odds against any narcissistically inspired afterlife. And it is narcissism; a cornerstone particularly of the Yahwehian religions that have the audacity to claim their god made man in his own image. That is in due course to assume that their god has an equal number of hairs as a chimpanzee, albeit his and ours are finer so as to give the impression of nakedness. It is to assume their god has an appendix; great at one time when heavy nuts and leaves were a part of his and our diet but utterly useless and oftentimes quite dangerous now. It is to assume Yahweh, like us, has a completely dysfunctional Jacobson’s Organ in his nose or the equally useless auriculares muscles in his ear. It is to assume Yahweh has wisdom teeth, now meaningless plantaris muscles in his feet, or the completely unusable remnant of a tail in the coccyx. It’s narcissism, pure and simple, to believe you are so perfect a representation of life that your form and consciousness should be preserved forever. It’s narcissism to believe you’re so deeply wonderful that although you lived your life moving from one near cataclysm to the next punctuated only by moments of brilliance and sometimes horrible failings that you should be gifted a perfect heavenly abode after death just so you can live the life you always thought you could have had it not been for life itself getting in the way. “
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I like it! Maybe you could polish it off for a new post. I’d never thought about the ‘in his image’ thing in terms of all the now pointless parts of our body. But this “so you can live the life you always thought you could have had it not been for life itself getting in the way” is a big poke in the eye to all of us!
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It’s true, though, isn’t it. “I’ll have that nice hillside cottage i always wanted in heaven… and i’ll grow that herb garden i never got around to planting.” Sam Harris has a brilliant lecture on this where he talks about the “emergency” of life; something the deeply religious do not feel.
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Do you feel an emergency about life? I certainly don’t. I think there’s a tendency to scratch your head on the conveyor belt regardless of your religious persuasion. We’re just like ants. But scratching our heads about it all.
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Nope. I’m (apparently) so mellow sloths think i’m slow… that’s according to my better half. Everything has a time, and sometimes magic takes a while to sort everything out 😉
Hey, i’m not getting notifications that you’ve commented/replied. Same thing’s happening over on Arks blog. What’s going on?
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I’ve had that problem before. After logging back into WP (presumably because I kicked out for an upgrade of some sort) my comment details would fill in automatically so I assumed my comments were ‘logged in’ too. But you have to hit the WP icon around the comment box to actually be logged in and for your comments to link to your account. Does that make sense?
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No, not at all. Let me read it again…. Nope. Are you saying i should log out and log back in somehow?
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Ok, I think i understand. Hit the little w when replying. Does this sort it out from now on, or do i have to do it every time?
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I think it just happens sometimes if you log out, or get kicked out for an upgrade. Not all the time. But if your details appear written in all the boxes you’re not actually logged in … bit bizarre.
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Wohooo… I got this notice! You are a genius!
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Yeah well, you know where to come. (I can’t believe you asked Ark first!)
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I didn’t, did I? Perhaps as one Luddite to another i merely informed him technology was conspiring against me.
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BTW, did you see the latest round of comments from our Dear Alan? He’s a rather odd man
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Oh, I’ll have to pop over and check that out …
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You’re right, it is all rather odd. He doesn’t really say anything, it’s all a bit fluffy, like his entire philosophy is he just doesn’t like the idea of atheism, so Christianity must be right.
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You don’t mean to say we are all mindless sycophants :-P. I saw that comment and I don’t know whether the good fellow responded to my query[am off to check] but agree with you on the conclusion that our lives as far as we can tell are meaningless beyond the meaning we create for ourselves and it is rather comforting that in the not so distant future we will become food to trees.
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“You don’t mean to say we are all mindless sycophants” – ha ha, yes, sometimes reading down John’s comments it just seems all too sickeningly positive. And then I join in …
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You know it is the same here, you preach to the choir, I love it here so sometimes I just see the beautiful picture and all the comments are accolades all the way down :-P.
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Well, the difference being that only three people comment here, and they mostly say something irrelevant to the topic. 🙂
John has 100 people paraphrasing ‘wow, you’re a genius!’ then a confused Christian who gets set upon by the wolves …
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Hahahaha 😛 that’s an interesting observation
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But, violet, you are just a genius, not just a bit like John, but very much indeed. Your analogy, about you wishing for magic powers and dragons to be real, was just brilliant.
It is a curious concept, that the meaning of one’s own life comes from beyond oneself. Perhaps it is a social trait. That we as social animals have such a high degree of self awareness as members of our social unit, that it is natural for us to hope for outside appriciation for our lives. But, if we start to expect social acceptance and meaning to our lives from beyond our selves and our social group (be that ones loved ones, countrymen, fellow believers, or all of humanity), what does that serve?
Perhaps, in the religious mind there is some sort of difficulty to separate the social expectations and self serving natural urges because of ignorance of their origin, so that they become dependant on this concept of “higher intelligence” policing their own behavior? Or maybe it is just infantilism, where reality faced is so terrible, that one chooses to trust an invisible and loving authority, because it happens to be part of cultural heritage to do so? Sort of cultural phenomenon creating a problem and then offering a solution, or at least means to cope whith it. There is lot of that around religions. Arbitrary problems.
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Thanks Raut! You’re very kind. That’s a really interesting point about us needing validation from outside ourselves. We’re very vulnerable creatures. I often wonder how much of a pull religion is for people who have had bad poor parenting experiences – it must fill a huge void.
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I would like to quote here from Qur’an:
[23:116] ‘Did you then think that We had created you without purpose, and that you would not be brought back to Us?’
https://alislam.org/quran/search2/showChapter.php?ch=23&verse=115
One may like to read the verses in the context.
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