Don't get me wrong> I'm not trying to convince you. We are sharing our conceptions of meaning. If your perspective satisfies your need for meaning, just be content. I've been kicked out of forums for half of what I've suggested with you. I'm fortunate now that irate secular intolerants and hostile mods seem to be temporarily asleep so we can get away with such a comparison of perspectives.Dontaskme wrote: ↑Fri Nov 06, 2020 9:06 am Nick..I do not see the world the way you do...and nothing you can say to me will ever convince me of valuing your ideas. I've already made up my mind about what is happening here. And NO, my understanding of what it is to be alive has not made me go mad or insane, in fact I'm totally at peace and comfortable with myself in every moment. I've never personally abused my own body or mind. But others have tried and failed to impose abuse upon me. So for me, the only positive about being born is the knowing that any thing born will die.
I already know myself from within my own direct experience of beingness here, I do not NEED to be informed by 'another' as to what the ''myself'' needs or what I am or what I am not. Only I can work out what it is I want to know. I'm the only reliable source of knowledge. I worked that out very early on in my life.
For me, there is no such thing as a utopian new man. The only utopia that could possibly exist in my logic is within the realm of the unborn.
There are no winners here in the realm of the born, life is designed to FAIL, it's a losing game everytime. If and when there is a winner, then that winner has only been made a winner because something else has been made a loser which is sick. And so even as the winner stands, that winner also loses in the end, life is a dead end, the default position. All totally meaningless, we're born without meaning, and we go out without meaning.
We can stop this meaningless existence any time we like by going extinct, but nature will do that for us eventually anyway, for every life form will at some point in the evolutionary assembly line go extinct, that's the way evolution works in my opinion, no intelligent brain made this universe, it's as dumb as rock.
The universe will not shed one tear if man goes extinct, in the same sense the universe DOES NOT cry for the non-life that is on Mars, or on the Moon, or on Jupiter .....if you get my drift.
It is very difficult to discuss what God is and the purpose of Creation. It has become an emotionally charged topic and probably impossible to discuss on the internet where secularism is dominant. It has to move underground.
You are an emotionally sensitive woman so easy to understand why you believe as you do. Life is nothing more than a sadistic horrible joke. If it justifies your suffering there is nothing to object. I respect your beliefs and hopfully you respect my concern for the question of God and the purpose of our universe. It is an expression of my conscious need for meaning. This is the conclusion of an interview with Jacob Needleman. It will be ridiculed by secularism yet understood by those willing to share privately. The Internet gives us the opportunity to meet each other in order to share privately
https://www.watkinsmagazine.com/what-is ... -needleman
Obviousaly A special attitude is needed which we know by experience isn't possible for secular philosophy. But it can be found privately and people can consciously reason together free of emotional bias in their need for meaning.Q: How does our present confusion about the concept of God reflect a widespread psychological or spiritual starvation? How would you guide someone who is confused about the concept of God?
A: Every human being is born with an intrinsic yearning to understand, to contact and, eventually, to serve something higher in ourselves and in the universe. Plato calls this yearning eros. It defines us as human beings—even more than our biological nature, our social conditioning or our ordinary reasoning capacity. Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human. At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.
As to how I would guide someone who is confused about the idea of God, I would suggest that he or she begins identifying what one might called “philosophical friends,”—people with whom one could seriously examine our thought about God through listening to each other, reading important and useful books together and trying to think for oneself while familiarizing oneself with the ideas of some of the world’s great thinkers. Cultivate openness without gullibility and skepticism without cynicism.
And, as soon as possible, be on the lookout for someone whose whole manner of speaking and being makes, as it were, a “sound” that draws your mind and heart. And then, little by little, try to see if that person can be of real help on the way to genuine self-knowledge and insight about what God is and is not. In this realm, more than any other even, the paradoxical marriage of both openness and scepticism is essential.