The Meaning of Life

[chaz wyman]

There is a difference between worldly and christian hedonism.

I am certain CW was not referring to christian hedonism. Indeed, it would be a miracle if he was. LOL

Indeed.
Love is anti-christian for the most part. Christianity, judging from those that call themselves christian, love of god is purely selfish, wanting only to survive death; and their attitude to others is woefully unloving.

When you love another person, love is a daily joy, and finding a pursuing activities together is a hedonistic pleasure.
Clearly I feel no shame nor guilt at finding pleasure, but then I do not have god breathing down my neck.

[chaz wyman]

There is a difference between worldly and christian hedonism.

I am certain CW was not referring to christian hedonism. Indeed, it would be a miracle if he was. LOL

There is? What exactly would the difference be? Anything like the difference between, well, AC/DC and, what? Stryper?

No the difference is that as a non christian my hedonism does not involve me is guilt or shame.
I just saw Dawkins latest programme; Sex Death and the Meaning of Life, he interviews a person that has done a survey of pre-marital sex, masturbation and porn use comparing Christian and non religious folk in the US.
His findings were interesting - there is NO difference in incidence - the only difference is that as the religious get older there is a 5+% increase in porn in the religious, not found in the non-religous. The main difference is in attitude. All though wanking and fornicating is as common the religious people live a life of guilt and denial

This idea of sin penetrates even the secular, with reasonvemotion making an assumption that hedonism, being 'selfish', is negative.

[chaz wyman]

2 Timothy 3: 2-5

People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobediant to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treachorous, rash, conceited. lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God having a form of Godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

Lots of adjectives there. And, sure, people are and will be all of those things. Though not all at once. As for loving pleasure rather than loving God, how about loving God by loving pleasure?

Fine, but NOT Christian.
QED you have argued against yourself.

[duszek]

Love as selfish pursuit of pleasure and as a sacrifice could be like two aspects of the same glass of water: half empty or half full, depending on your personality type.

How about some specific examples ?

I you do something "good" to someone out of a sense of duty and not because you love this person and are happy to make this person happy too, then this is not love but ... work ?

I sacrifice 5,00 bucks and buy a friend a present. It is my pleasure to make her happy, is it not ?

Peace.
(as the Quakers would say)

[Impenitent]

sacrifice your son for your love of god...

-Imp

[duszek]

The Meaning of Life is to survive every day by celebrating its presents like a ravenous caterpillar.

The MoL is to try different roles in different films and to watch one´s soul in the process.

To aspire wholiness by avoiding Holy Woods and cheap thrills.

To become a self-sufficient comedian.

To jump out of the swamp (of manipulation).

To find the time lost and redecorate it.

To discover love and beauty in unexpected places.

[duszek]

sacrifice your son for your love of god...

-Imp

Do you mean a conflict of loves ?
Then your heart should tell you the way out of the conflict.
Or go and ask people for advice until someone tells you the right thing to do. It could be even Dr. Laura, why not.

[chaz wyman]

Love as selfish pursuit of pleasure and as a sacrifice could be like two aspects of the same glass of water: half empty or half full, depending on your personality type.

How about some specific examples ?

I you do something "good" to someone out of a sense of duty and not because you love this person and are happy to make this person happy too, then this is not love but ... work ?

I sacrifice 5,00 bucks and buy a friend a present. It is my pleasure to make her happy, is it not ?

Peace.
(as the Quakers would say)

Yes,
It seems a peculiar perversion of some christians that love has something to do with duty and should not be done with pleasure. I think that is sick. Love has to be a thing cherished and enjoyed otherwise its not really love in any meaningful sense. To turn that from a happy event into making pleasure sinful is a disgrace.

[chaz wyman]

sacrifice your son for your love of god...

-Imp

That's easy for you to say. It's the son that has all the pain, and the father all the reward. How is that supposed to work?

[duszek]

Pleasure is only a sin if it is excessive and thus destroys life or harms the body, like for example gluttony.

If pleasure enhances and promotes life then it is all right and welcome.

[duszek]

sacrifice your son for your love of god...

-Imp

That's easy for you to say. It's the son that has all the pain, and the father all the reward. How is that supposed to work?

Perhaps you never have been a father but a normal father suffers a lot when he has to kill his child. (And a mother too, of course.)

[chaz wyman]

Pleasure is only a sin if it is excessive and thus destroys life or harms the body, like for example gluttony.

If pleasure enhances and promotes life then it is all right and welcome.

How does fornication or masturbation harm the body?

[Felasco]

A search for the meaning of life is a search for real living, that is, a search for death. As example...

Imagine that we are having wild sex with our favorite partner. Are we searching for the meaning of life now? No. Who cares about meaning when we are fully consumed by really living?

When we're really living, we are dead. Not our bodies, but the internal collection of abstract thoughts called "me".

Thoughts are like photographs of reality. These mental photographs are very useful, but because they aren't the real thing they point to, they are a second hand experience of reality, just as any photograph is. Thus, while thoughts can be quite compelling sometimes, this second hand experience lacks adequate psychic nutrition.

Looking at these mental photographs is like trying to have sex with a picture of our favorite partner, instead of our favorite partner. We can do it, but it's just not the same. Something important is missing.

So while we spend much of our lives in this second hand experience called thought, thinking endlessly about me, me, me, me, me and more me, we become hungry. We're not sure for what exactly, but something is missing.

So we go looking for something to munch on, something to fill the hole. If we're grand philosopher types, we may go searching for the meaning of life, because that sounds stimulating, a big project that might fill the hole we can't quite put our finger on.

But in the end, the meaning of life is of course itself a thought too. So it too is a second hand experience, and never quite fully satisfies. So we go looking for something else. Hey, maybe arguing with somebody else's meaning of life will work! But that too, is just more thought, more second hand experience, more empty calories.

To illustrate, if arguing with other people's meaning of life could satisfy us, then after a couple visits to a forum we'd be good to go, mission accomplished, hunger satisfied, and we wouldn't have to keep coming back to the forum day after day after day, for years on end.

To debunk my own post, if I really knew what I was talking about I wouldn't still be typing.

[Impenitent]

Abraham is smiling...

-Imp

[duszek]

I would not say that the "me" is dead if we are absorbed by something important happening in our lives.
As I have observed we are not self-conscious at such a moment. We have no time to worry or to doubt about anything else.
Time does not matter. It is only later that we realize how much time had passed.

Many years ago I got engaged into a sort of philosophical discussion with a man and my friends got angry because they wanted us to leave and they expressed it. Finally I seperated from my discussion partner and I looked at the watch and realized that it was broken, I shook it, the hour it showed was absurd. I asked what time it was and my friend made a very unpleasant face and told me.
The watch was not broken at all.
It seemed that I had been sucked in by this conversation for several hours and I did not notice.
I was not exhausted at all, I was flying, only my friends were making ugly faces and punishing me with ugly comments.